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,

#3351

Ping Zhang

#183573

Overall Influence

Ping Zhang is an American structural biologist researching the structural and mechanistic basis of multi-component kinase signaling complexes that are linked to human cancers and other diseases, with a long-term goal of developing new therapeutic strategies. She is a NIH Stadtman Investigator in the Structural Biophysics Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute.

#3352

Silvie Huijben

#184583

Overall Influence

Silvie Huijben is an evolutionary biologist and Assistant Professor at Arizona State University. The Huijben Lab uses fieldwork, lab experiments, and mathematical modeling to study antimalarial and insecticide resistance in parasites, such as disease-transmitting mosquitoes. Her work is focused on applying evolutionary theory to produce resistance management strategies to best combat malaria.

#3353

Shubulade Smith

#72380

Overall Influence

Shubulade Smith is a British academic and consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust . She is a senior lecturer at King's College, London and Clinical Director at the NCCMH and forensic services at SLaM, and is .

#3354

Min Chen

#167206

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Min Chen is an Australian plant physiologist. She was born in China and educated in Northeast Normal University China - BSc in 1984 and MSc in 1987 and received her PhD in 2003 from The University of Sydney Australia. She is a full professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her research is primarily concerned with elucidating the molecular and biochemical mechanism of the energy-storing reactions in photosynthetic organisms, especially the function of novel photopigments in oxygenic photosynthetic bacteria.

#3355

Marieke Lettink

#186966

Overall Influence

Marieke Lettink is a New Zealand herpetologist. Biography Lettink holds a master's in science from the University of Canterbury, and a postgraduate diploma in wildlife management and a PhD in Zoology both from the University of Otago.

#3356

Geraldine A. Allen

#187711

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Geraldine Anne Allen is a botanist, professor of biology, and herbarium curator at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She obtained formal education at the University of British Columbia and Oregon State University, earning a Doctor of Philosophy degree in botany and plant pathology from the latter in 1981. During her career, she has authored or co-authored over 50 publications, including genera chapters for Flora of North America and the Jepson Manual. She also has authored several species of the Erythronium genus.

#3357

Jennifer Li

#59966

Overall Influence

Jennifer M. Li is a Systems Neuroscience & Neuroengineering researcher who is a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the RoLi lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. She records and manipulates neural activity in larval zebra fish to research motivation and attention. and has been published in the journal Nature for her work on how the zebra fish brain switches between internal states when foraging for live prey. The RoLi lab has developed a revolutionary microscopy systems that enable whole-brain imaging of freely swimming larval zebra fish. With this technology, Li and Rob...

#3358

Heidrun Hartmann

#101294

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Heidrun Hartmann, née Heidrun Elsbeth Klara Osterwald was a German botanist. She worked at the University of Hamburg and specialised in Aizoaceae, Crassulaceae, collected plants from Africa and South America.

#3359

Alana Alexander

#99099

Overall Influence

Alana Alexander is a New Zealand bioinformatician at the University of Otago. In 2021, she was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to investigate the past impacts of fisheries on Hector's and Māui dolphins, and use genomics to inform models of the future effects of climate change on whales and dolphins.

#3360

Jennifer Eigenbrode

#172895

Overall Influence

Jennifer Eigenbrode is an interdisciplinary astrobiologist who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She specializes in organic chemistry, geology, and organic bio-geochemistry of martian and ocean-world environments.

#3361

Julia Horsfield

#188756

Overall Influence

Julia Anne Horsfield is a New Zealand biochemist and developmental geneticist. She is professor of pathology at the University of Otago and director of Genetics Otago and the Otago Zebrafish Facility.

#3362

Wendi Roe

#185984

Overall Influence

Wendi Dianne Roe is a New Zealand veterinary pathologist who specialises in researching marine mammals. She is Professor of Veterinary and Marine Mammal Pathology and Deputy Head of the School of Veterinary Science at Massey University.

#3363

Barbara Anderson

#187436

Overall Influence

Barbara Jane Anderson is a New Zealand ecologist. Education Anderson graduated with a PhD in botany from the University of Otago, Dunedin, in 2006. Research and career Beginning in 2015, Anderson co-ordinates a citizen science project, the Ahi Pepe MothNet project which encourages members of the public to engage with moths at Orokonui Ecosanctuary. The project brought public attention to the role of moths in the ecosystem and also provides schoolchildren and adults with an experience of "hands-on" science. As a result of the interest in the project, a bilingual Māori–English guide to New Zealand moths was published in 2018.

#3364

Leslie Parent

#143035

Overall Influence

Leslie J. Parent is an American microbiologist and immunologist currently professor and vice dean of the College of Medicine at Pennsylvania State University. She is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Society for Microbiology.

#3365

Sarah Gabbott

#185132

Overall Influence

Sarah Gabbott is a palaeobiologist from the University of Leicester. She is known for her research on decomposition and fossilization. Her focus is soft-bodied animals, details of which are often lost during decay.

#3366

Elizabeth Reitz

#180328

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Elizabeth Jean "Betsy" Reitz is a zooarchaeologist and Professor Emerita in the Georgia Museum of Natural History and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia. She was born in 1946 in Lake Alfred, Florida. She attended Florida Presbyterian College from 1966 to 1967. She received her BA , MA , and her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Florida. Her dissertation was directed by Elizabeth Wing. In 2012, she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2014, she was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was t...

#3367

Carolyn Lawrence-Dill

#188643

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Carolyn Joy Lawrence-Dill is an American plant biologist and academic administrator. She develops computational systems and tools to help plant science researchers use plant genetics and genomics data for basic biology applications that advance plant breeding.

#3368

Lyn Forster

#170275

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Lyndsay McLaren Forster was a New Zealand arachnologist. Biography Forster was born in Upper Hutt and grew up on a small farm near Feilding. She enrolled at Victoria University College in Wellington but moved to Christchurch in 1948 without completing her degree. She moved again to Dunedin in 1957; in the late 1960s she returned to her university studies and eventually completed a PhD at the University of Otago in 1979.

#3369

Ursula Bettina Göhlich

#188961

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

#3370

Michelle Samuel-Foo

#188851

Overall Influence

Michelle Susan Samuel-Foo is an American biologist and Assistant Professor of Biology at Alabama State University. She serves as President of the Southeastern Entomological Society of America. In 2020 Samuel-Foo became the first African-American person to win a major award for entomology when she was awarded the Entomological Society of America Founders' Memorial Recognition.

#3371

Kathleen Stafford

#185785

Overall Influence

Kate Stafford is the Senior Principal Oceanographer in the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington and an affiliate Associate Professor in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is also an Associate Professor and Principal Investigator at Oregon State University in the Marine Mammal Institute. Her research focuses on the changing acoustic landscape and the impacts of declining sea ice and human industrial influences affect Arctic marine mammals.

#3372

Alison Hester

#186384

Overall Influence

Alison Hester is an ecologist in the UK, a professor at the Aberdeen site of the James Hutton Institute, Scotland, and an expert in the effects of land management on biodiversity. Education and career Hester was educated at King's College London, she then did a PhD at the University of Aberdeen and was a Royal Society Postdoctoral Fellow at CSIRO Western Australia.

#3373

Sarah Rowland-Jones

#120675

Overall Influence

Sarah Rowland-Jones is a British physician who is a Professor of Immunology at the University of Oxford. She works on immune responses to HIV infection. She has focussed her research on problems caused by HIV in Africa, with a hope to create a successful HIV vaccine. She is the former president of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

#3374

Heike Brötz-Oesterhelt

#185524

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Heike Brötz-Oesterhelt is a German microbiologist. She is a full professor and holds the Chair of the Department for Microbial Bioactive Compounds at the Interfaculty Institute for Microbiology and Infection Medicine, University of Tübingen, Germany.

#3375

Hanna Margońska

#187737

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Hanna Bogna Margońska, born 1968 is a Polish botanist known for her work on orchids. Dr. Hanna Margońska is a botanical researcher and faculty member at Gdańsk University, Department of Plant Taxonomy and Conservation.

#3376

Nikki Turner

#51216

Overall Influence

Nicola Mary Turner is a New Zealand public health advocate who is a Professor at the University of Auckland and Medical Director of the Immunisation Advisory Centre, an organisation that advises the New Zealand medical profession and the New Zealand Government. She has contributed to advisory committees for the New Zealand Ministry of Health, is a spokesperson for the Child Poverty Action Group and works in general practice. Much of her research and outreach has focused on improving immunisation coverage and closing equity gaps for the national schedule vaccine delivery in New Zealand and sh...

#3377

Ingrid Eftedal

#184989

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Ingrid Eftedal is a Norwegian molecular biologist and barophysiologist who is employed at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . At NTNU, she has been a senior researcher and head of the barophysiology research group. She has also been a dean and associate professor at the Faculty of Nursing and Health Sciences at Nord University. Eftedal holds a PhD in molecular genetics.

#3378

Mary Lou Guerinot

#182287

Overall Influence

Mary Lou Guerinot is an American molecular geneticist who works as Ronald and Deborah Harris Professor in the Sciences at Dartmouth College. Her research concerns the cellular uptake and regulation of metal ions.

#3379

Rosalind Morris

#178638

Overall Influence

1920 - 2022 (102 years)

Mary Rosalind Morris was a professor of plant cytogenetics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1947 to 1990. She was one of the first women to earn a doctoral degree in genetics and plant breeding from Cornell University, was the first female faculty member in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture at UNL, and was the first woman fellow of the American Society of Agronomy. Her pioneering work on "misbehaving chromosomes" in wheat cytogenetics was internationally recognized. In 1980, she served as president of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences. She was awarded a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

#3380

Amanda M. Hulse-Kemp

#189284

Overall Influence

Amanda M. Hulse-Kemp is a computational biologist with the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service. She works in the Genomics and Bioinformatics Research Unit and is stationed on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh, North Carolina.

#3381

Fiona McDonald

#120342

Overall Influence

Fiona Jean McDonald is a New Zealand physiologist, professor and head of the McDonald Lab and the Department of Physiology at the University of Otago. Academic career McDonald was born in Roxburgh, New Zealand. After graduating from St Hilda's Collegiate School in Dunedin she completed a BSc at the University of Otago. She then studied at the University of Oxford for a DPhil for her thesis, "Studies on the role of FGF-4 in mouse development". In 2011 McDonald was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study the function of a protein named COMMD10 at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

#3382

Hinemoa Elder

#27253

Overall Influence

Hinemoa Elder is a New Zealand youth forensic psychiatrist and former television presenter. She is a professor in indigenous research at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, a fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, and sits on the Māori Advisory Committee of the Centre for Brain Research.

#3383

Marybeth Daucher

#188345

Overall Influence

Mary Elizabeth Daucher is an American biologist serving as the acting chief of the vaccine production program laboratory at Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

#3384

June Andrews

#96777

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

June Andrews, , is a Scottish nurse who is an expert in dementia studies and aged care. She was the professor of dementia studies at the Dementia Services Development Centre at the University of Stirling. She is now Professor Emeritus. She has written many publications on the topics of dementia, care homes and geriatric care.

#3385

Isabel Dorado Liñán

#189203

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Isabel Dorado Liñán is a Spanish researcher and Doctor in Ecology. Her research focuses on forest ecology and the study of tree rings in the context of climate change. Education Isabel Dorado graduated in biology, specializing in Environmental Biology from the University of Alicante. At this university Dorado started her doctoral thesis, in the Department of Ecology, focused on the study of tree rings. She studied the changing activity in a pine species from different locations and with different age categories, to better understand the influence of climate and aging on the formation of wood.

#3386

Rosie Alegado

#175457

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Rosanna "Rosie" ʻAnolani Alegado is a Kanaka ʻōiwi/Native Hawaiian Associate Professor of Oceanography at the Daniel K. Inouye Center for Microbial Oceanography as well as director of the Hawai‘i Sea Grant’s Ulana 'Ike Center of Excellence at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Alegado studies the evolution of host–microbe interactions and the microbial ecology of coastal estuarine systems.

#3387

Isabel Castro

#189459

Overall Influence

Isabel Castro is professor of wildlife biology at Massey University in New Zealand. Her research focuses on conservation biology, primarily of birds and native ecosystems, but also including invertebrates and introduced mammals. She is a principal investigator in the Te Pūnaha Matatini Centre of Research Excellence.

#3388

Kathleen Lavoie

#141334

Overall Influence

1949 - 2022 (73 years)

Kathleen Hoey Lavoie was an American microbiologist and explorer who was Professor of Biological Sciences at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. Lavoie was a Fellow of the National Speleological Society and the Cave Research Foundation. She was a specialist in biospeleology, and, in particular, the Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.

#3389

Sabina Brennan

#184409

Overall Influence

Sabina Brennan is an Irish neuroscientist, psychologist, and former television actress. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor working at Trinity College Dublin. Early life and family Brennan is the youngest of five children. Her father worked for Irish Life and she followed him into this business after finishing school. She is married and has two sons.

#3390

Visitación Conforti

#186495

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Profª. Dra. Visitación Teresa Dora Conforti de Marconi is an Argentine biologist, algologist, botanist, taxonomist and ecologist. She is a professor in the Department of Biodiversity and Experimental Biology in the University of Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires. She is noted for her numerous taxonomic studies of Euglenophyta, including in polluted rivers in Argentina. Camaleão Lake in Brazil in 1994 and the Caura River in Venezuela in the late 1990s.

#3391

Ida Theilade

#189539

Overall Influence

Ida Theilade is a Danish botanist. She is a professor of at the University of Copenhagen. Education Theilade has a PhD in tropical botany from the University of Copenhagen. Ida Theilade is chair of the board of the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. She is a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission on threatened trees.

#3392

Margaret Frame

#94149

Overall Influence

Margaret Frame is Professor of Cancer Biology and Science Director of Cancer Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. She is also Director of MRC Institute of Genetics & Molecular Medicine. She has made seminal contributions to understanding mechanisms of cell adhesion and motility. She previously served as deputy-director of the Beatson Institute in Glasgow.

#3393

Colette St. Mary

#189380

Overall Influence

Colette Marie St. Mary is a professor and associate chair of the biology department at the University of Florida. Her research focuses include behavioral and evolutionary ecology, speciation, sexual selection, and evolutionary aspects of cancer. Working mainly with fish model organisms, St. Mary is also interested in marine fisheries management and reproduction and evolution in hatchery settings. St. Mary received her Bachelor's degree in Biology from Harvard Radcliffe College before earning her Ph.D from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994. She is the first African-American woman to ever receive a Ph.D.

#3394

Anne Elvey

#79788

Overall Influence

Anne Frances Elvey is an Australian academic, editor, researcher and poet. Education Elvey has completed at Bachelor of Science with Honours, a Graduate Diploma in Education , a Bachelor of Theology, a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Philosophy.

#3395

Aditi Shankardass

#180339

Overall Influence

Aditi Shankardass is a British neuroscientist. She has appeared in the media to discuss developmental disorders in children, including on CNN, ABC News, the Times of India, and the Financial Express. She discussed the topic in her talk in 2009 at the TED conference.

#3396

Aline Betancourt

#188988

Overall Influence

Aline M. Betancourt is an American biochemist, an associate professor of medicine and microbiology at Tulane University. Betancourt works on developing mesenchymal stem cell based therapies, and is the CSO and founder of two companies aimed at producing clinical products using this technology.

#3397

Nurcan Tunçbağ

#164576

Overall Influence

Nurcan Tunçbağ is a Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Koç University. She works on computational models of complex biological systems. Tunçbağ is a 2019 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Rising Talent.

#3398

Grace Wyngaard

#189626

Overall Influence

Grace Wyngaard is an American biologist at James Madison University and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#3399

Annick Le Thomas

#173588

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Annick Le Thomas is a French botanist, best known for her work in the field of pollen analysis. She is a recognised expert on the Annonaceae family of flowering plants.

#3400

Marguerite Evans-Galea

Marguerite Evans-Galea

#184941

Overall Influence

Marguerite Virginia Evans-Galea is the co-founder of Women in STEMM Australia. STEMM . Her research is focused on gene therapy and neurodegenerative diseases. Early life and education Evans-Galea grew up in Mackay, Queensland. She was raised by her mother after her parents separated. In High School she learned clarinet and discovered classical music. After school she planned to be a music therapist, but she was "bitten by the science bug" in her third year of university.

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