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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Biology,

#3401

Elizabeth Adkins-Regan

#186255

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Elizabeth Adkins-Regan is an American comparative behavioral neuroendocrinologist best known for her research on the hormonal and neural mechanisms of reproductive behavior and sexual differentiation in birds. She is currently a professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University.

#3402

Rosie Trevelyan

#188416

Overall Influence

Rosie Trevelyan is a British biologist, and director of the Cambridge office of the Tropical Biology Association. She won the 2008 Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London. Life She earned a BA and DPhil. from Oxford University. She was co-founder of the Cambridge Conservation Forum. She lectures in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge.

#3403

Ave Suija

#189756

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Ave Suija is an Estonian lichenologist. The lichenicolous fungus species Capronia suijae was named in her honour in 2017. See also :Category:Taxa named by Ave Suija

#3404

Elizabeth McGraw

#183014

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Ann McGraw is an American biologist who is a professor in entomology at Pennsylvania State University. She is the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and a Huck Scholar in Entomology. Her research investigates the bacterium Wolbachia as a strategy for biocontrol and to better understand the basis of its interactions with insects. She was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.

#3405

Dianne Sika-Paotonu

#105189

Overall Influence

Dianne Sika-Paotonu is a New Zealand immunologist, biomedical scientist and academic in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine and Associate Dean at the University of Otago Wellington. She is of Tongan descent and is the first Pasifika biomedical scientist to receive the Cranwell Medal for science communication in 2020 and the 2022 Prime Minister's Science Communicator of the Year prize.

#3406

Creu Casas

#179175

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Creu Casas i Sicart was a Catalan biologist and botanist. After graduating from the University of Barcelona, she became a bryology specialist and started a large inventory of Catalan and European bryophytes. She wrote two important books on this subject Flora dels Briòfits dels Països Catalans and Handbook of mosses of the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands .

#3407

Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds

#177257

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds was an American ecologist, biologist and author of Not Just Trees. She studied the Saddleback Mountain research site from 1935 to 1969. Early life Dirks-Edmunds was born in the Ozarks of Arkansas in 1912, the youngest of ten children. Her parents, Linda Gates and Peter B. Dirks traveled in 1924 to Puget Sound, Washington State, finally settling in the Umpqua Valley of Oregon. In the prologue of her book Not Just Trees: The Legacy of a Douglas-fir Forest, she notes an early love of the Northwest's forests; this admiration continued through her academic years. Dirks-Edmunds attended Linfield College from 1932 to 1937, where she received her B.S.

#3408

Diana Hill

#101583

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Diana Florence Hill is a New Zealand academic, and a full professor at the University of Otago, specialising in molecular genetics. Hill's team's work on the genetics of animal production was awarded a Silver Medal by the Royal Society in 1996. She has been a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi since 1997.

#3409

Catherine Hayes Bailey

#125576

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Catherine Hayes Bailey was an American plant geneticist known for developing new varieties of fruit. She was honored by the National Peach Council for her contributions to the US peach industry. Early life and education Bailey was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey; her father was superintendent for the Rutgers Vegetable Farm. She received her bachelor's degree from Douglass College in 1942. She worked with Rutgers horticulturist Maurice Blake, and ran his stone-fruit growing program until 1948. Encouraged by Blake she entered the Ph. D. program at Rutgers University, and graduated in 1957 with a dissertation on aspects of growing peach cultivars.

#3410

Catherine Sole

#86280

Overall Influence

Catherine Lynne Sole is a South African entomologist. She leads the Invertebrate Biosystematics and Conservation Group in the department of zoology and entomology at the University of Pretoria. Sole completed her PhD in entomology in 2005, followed by post docs in Prof Scholtze’s group and she was appointed in 2013 as a senior lecturer in the department, promoted to associate professor in 2016 and to full professor in 2023. Sole has contributed significantly to the understanding of scarabaeoid and nemopterid systematics at both a local and international level. Sole is one of the African coo...

#3411

Annettee Nakimuli

#188498

Overall Influence

Annettee Olivia Nakimuli is a Ugandan obstetrician, gynecologist, medical researcher, academic and academic administrator. Since 17 February 2021, she serves as the Dean of Makerere University School of Medicine, the oldest medical school in East Africa. She concurrently serves as the Head of Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the same medical school, a role she has served in since 2016. She is also the President of the East, Central and Southern Africa College of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

#3412

D. Jade Simon

#188515

Overall Influence

D. Jade Simon is an American paleontologist, scientific communicator, and disability rights advocate. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, where she studies the paleobiology of oviraptorosaur dinosaurs.

#3413

Mercè Durfort i Coll

#180248

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

Mercè Durfort i Coll was a Spanish biologist and professor. She was a member of Institute for Catalan Studies from 1989 until her death.

#3414

Beth Gott

#182735

Overall Influence

1922 - 2022 (100 years)

Margaret Beth Gott was an Australian plant physiologist, ethnobotanist and academic who specialised in the use of indigenous plants in south-east Australia. Academic career Born Margaret Beth Noye, , Gott won a Trinity College Council Non-Resident Exhibition in 1940, and completed a BSc in botany at the University of Melbourne with first class honours as well as being awarded the Caroline Kay Scholarship in Botany for 1943. She then studied at London University, where her research was the life-cycle of rye cereals. She later undertook research on Australian wheat varieties at the University ...

#3415

Estela V. Welldon

Estela V. Welldon

#67066

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Estela V. Welldon, MD DSc F.R.C.Psych Hon. Memb. A.Psa.A. BPC, is an honorary consultant psychiatrist in forensic psychotherapy at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. Biography Born in Mendoza, Argentina, she studied medicine at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. She founded of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy in 1991.

#3416

Elizabeth K. Cahoon

#171319

Overall Influence

Elizabeth "Lisa" Khaykin Cahoon is a Georgian-born American epidemiologist researching cancer and precancer risks conferred by environmental sources of radiation exposure. She is a Stadtman investigator at the National Cancer Institute.

#3417

Lai-Ming Ching

#188186

Overall Influence

Lai-Ming Ching is a New Zealand cellular biology academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After gaining a PhD in 1978 and producing a doctoral thesis titled 'Analysis of clones of cytotoxic lymphocytes' at the University of Auckland, Ching joined the staff, rising to full professor.

#3418

Graciela Piñeiro

#189820

Overall Influence

Graciela Helena Piñeiro Martínez is a Uruguayan biologist and paleontologist. Her work led to the discovery of Mesosaurus fossils in Uruguay.

#3419

Li Zhang

#189348

Overall Influence

Li Zhang is a biologist currently working at University of Texas at Dallas. She is a professor of Biological Sciences and the Cecil H. and Ida Green Distinguished Chair in Systems Biology Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. During her 20+ years of independent research, Li Zhang has made major contributions to the understanding of Heme signaling and function in gene regulation, neuronal differentiation and survival, and lung cancer bioenergetics.

#3420

Rosalind Coggon

#188834

Overall Influence

Rosalind Mary Coggon is an English scientist who is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She is the co-editor of the 2050 Science Framework, which guides multidisciplinary subseafloor research. She was awarded the 2021 American Geophysical Union Asahiko Taira International Scientific Ocean Drilling Research Prize.

#3421

Katharina T. Huber

#130234

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Katharina Theresia Huber is a German applied mathematician and mathematical biologist whose research concerns phylogenetic trees, evolutionary analysis, their mathematical foundations, and their mathematical visualization. She is an associate professor in the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia in England, and the school's director of postgraduate research.

#3422

Jane Wilhelms

#188462

Overall Influence

Jane Patricia Wilhelms was an American biologist and computer scientist known for her contributions to computer graphics, including work on anatomical simulation of humans and animals and collision detection in computer animation, and isosurfaces and volume rendering in scientific visualization. She was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

#3423

Jean Fleming

#188905

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jean Sutherland Fleming is a New Zealand reproductive biologist, science communication advocate and environmentalist. She has been a professor emerita in science communication since her retirement from the University of Otago in 2014.

#3424

Mariah Carbone

#175832

Overall Influence

Mariah Suzanne Carbone is an American geophysicist who is a professor of Geosciences at the Center for ecosystem science and society, Northern Arizona University. She studies terrestrial ecosystems and how they respond to environmental change.

#3425

Allison Haywood

#190297

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Allison Joy Haywood is a planktonologist from New Zealand. Haywood completed her doctorate degree at the University of Auckland, focusing on molecular systematics. Her thesis project aimed to rapidly identify toxic algae which can cause serious food poisoning. The title of her 2002 doctoral thesis was Morphological and molecular systematics of unarmoured dinoflagellates from New Zealand.

#3426

Angélica M. Arambarri

#182843

Overall Influence

1945 - 2012 (67 years)

Angélica Margarita Arambarri was an Argentine botanist and mycologist. She was vice dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum of the National University of La Plata.

#3427

Eleanor Lyon Duke

Eleanor Lyon Duke

#189147

Overall Influence

1918 - 2013 (95 years)

Eleanor Lyon Duke was a professor of biology at the University of Texas at El Paso , known for her 78-year association with the school and for her sex-discrimination lawsuit against the university. In 1974 she was named UTEP's "Outstanding Ex".

#3428

Rebecca M. Calisi Rodriguez

Rebecca M. Calisi Rodriguez

#190194

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Rebecca M. Calisi Rodriguez is an American neuroendocrinologist, wildlife biologist, and National Geographic Explorer. She is an Associate professor of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Calisi leads a research team that studies how the brain controls sexual behavior, reproduction, and parental care, and how this changes under stress. As the Director for Science Communications at UC Davis, Calisi also studies science communication and advocates for inclusivity, equity, and diversity in STEM.

#3429

Christiane Ayotte

#99070

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Christiane Ayotte, O.C., is a Canadian scientist and academic from Quebec. She is currently the director of the Armand-Frappier Santé Biotechnologie Research Centre was formerly the President of the World Association of Anti‐Doping Scientists from 20162018.

#3430

Antígona Segura

#128051

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Antígona Segura Peralta is a Mexican physicist and astrobiologist. Since 2006, she has been a researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and collaborator at the NASA Astrobiology Institute. As a feminist she actively advocates for the inclusion of women in the exact sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Segura has participated in several activities in and outside UNAM defending women's rights; she was awarded with the 2021 Hermila Galindo medal by the Congress of Mexico City.

#3431

Roberta Hamme

#61759

Overall Influence

Roberta C. Hamme is a Canadian chemical oceanographer at the University of Victoria. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Ocean Carbon Dynamics . Education, research and career She did her Phd and MSc at University of Washington and BA at Pomona College.

#3432

Olayinka Olusola Omigbodun

#95116

Overall Influence

Olayinka Olusola Omigbodun is the first Nigerian female professor of psychiatry. She is a Professor at the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. She is also the first female provost of the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan.

#3433

Kathryn Stowell

Kathryn Stowell

#171168

Overall Influence

Kathryn Mary Stowell is a New Zealand academic. In November 2022 she was appointed professor emerita, having been a full professor from 2016 at the Massey University. Academic career Stowell joined Massey University in 1976, after a 1990 PhD titled 'Cloning and expression of the cDNA for human lactoferrin,' she rose to full professor in 2015.

#3434

Laura Mays Hoopes

Laura Mays Hoopes

#183795

Overall Influence

Laura Mays Hoopes was an American biologist. She was the Halstead-Bent Emerita Professor of Biology at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She was dean of the college from 1993 to 1998, and was known for her advocacy of women in science. She was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#3435

Michelle G. Giglio

#189888

Overall Influence

Michelle Gwinn Giglio is an American biocurator specializing in genomics, transcriptomics, and metagenomics. At the University of Maryland School of Medicine, she is an associate professor in the department of medicine and the associate director of analysis at the institute for genome sciences.

#3436

Jennie Ponsford

#186075

Overall Influence

Jennie Louise Ponsford is an Australian neuroscience researcher at Monash University, Victoria who has a special interest in Traumatic Brain Injury . Jennie is a clinical neuropsychologist, whose work is focused on developing a deeper understanding of the negative consequences of TBI, particularly those related to fatigue, sleep disturbance, attentional, memory and executive problems, psychiatric and behavioural disturbances and sexuality, and the development of rehabilitation interventions to improve long term recovery and quality of life in individuals with TBI.

#3437

Cornelia B. Wilbur

#7505

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Cornelia Burwell Wilbur was an American psychiatrist. She is best known for a book, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and a television film, both titled Sybil, which were presented as non-fiction accounts of the psychiatric treatment she rendered to a person diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.

#3438

Tiina Randlane

#190611

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Tiina Randlane is an Estonian mycologist and lichenologist.

#3439

Sarah Spiegel

#190249

Overall Influence

Sarah Spiegel is professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Virginia Commonwealth University . In the mid-1990s she discovered the sphingosine-1-phosphate molecule, a lipid which has been identified as a signaler for the spread of cancer, inflammation, and cardiovascular disease. Her research continues to focus on S1P.

#3440

Lucile Hac

#98543

Overall Influence

1909 - 2006 (97 years)

Lucile Rose Hac was an American biochemist and microbiologist whose research interests included amino acids, antibiotics, and bone metabolism. She was director of research at International Minerals and Chemical Corporation and a faculty member in the biochemistry department at Northwestern University.

#3441

Jennifer Mackinnon

#189036

Overall Influence

Jennifer Ann Mackinnon is an American physical oceanographer who has studied small-scale dynamical processes in oceans for more than 20 years. These processes include internal waves and ocean mixing, turbulence, sub-mesoscale instabilities, and their complex interaction. She is a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California, San Diego . Her research requires some fieldwork at sea to observe these processes.

#3442

Tamily Weissman

#158901

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Tamily Weissman-Unni is a neurobiology professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon. She has published numerous studies on brain development and her current research focuses on formation of cerebellar circuits. Additionally, she has won several scientific imaging competitions for her striking multi-color pictures of the brain.

#3443

Nicola Shadbolt

Nicola Shadbolt

#190559

Overall Influence

Nicola Mary Shadbolt is a New Zealand farmer, academic and company director. She is currently a full professor at the Massey University and Chair of Plant & Food Research. Academic career Shadbolt earned degrees from the University of Nottingham and Lincoln College and a diploma from Massey University. Her master's thesis was titled Alternative management strategies and drafting policies for irrigated Canterbury sheep farms. Shadbolt worked at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and then in a variety of roles in government, agribusiness and consultancy before moving to Massey Universit...

#3444

Miriam Adhikari

#163568

Overall Influence

Miriam Adhikari is a physician and scientist specializing in paediatrics with a focus on neonatology. She is Emeritus Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a neonatologist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine. She also has a focus on paediatric nephrology and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

#3445

Halijah Ibrahim

#185421

Overall Influence

Halijah Ibrahim is a Malaysian botanist. Ibrahim was awarded her doctorate by the University of Newcastle, UK in 1979. She is a professor at the Institute of Biological Sciences at the University of Malaya. She specialises in medicinal chemistry of Malaysian plants with particular interest in Zingiberaceae.

#3446

Sally Stewart-Wade

#189629

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Dr. Sally Michelle Stewart-Wade is an Australian plant pathologist currently working as a Casual Professional at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Wade was born in 1969 in Sydney and completed her education at RMIT where she received a Bachelor of Applied Science in Applied Biology. She went on to complete her PhD at RMIT studying the "biological control of the weed thornapple." She has studied many aspects of weed control, as well as, fungal diseases on plants. Stewart-Wade has also reviewed the scientific literature twice for the nursery and garden industry ...

#3447

Maria McNamara

#190388

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Maria Eithne McNamara is an Irish palaeontologist. She is Professor of Palaeobiology at University College Cork. McNamara's research focuses on the preservation of soft tissues in the fossil record, fossil colour, and feather evolution through the use of laboratory analytical techniques, including FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, SEM, TEM, synchrotron-XRF and XANES. Furthermore, controlled laboratory-based taphonomic experiments that simulate aspects of the fossilization process are done to illustrate how information on biological structures and chemistry is lost during decay and diagenesis, and help...

#3448

Thara Rangaswamy

#100131

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Thara Rangaswamy is a psychiatrist in India, the co-founder of an NGO called SCARF based in Chennai, India. She is a researcher in schizophrenia and community mental health. In 2020, she received the SIRS Outstanding Clinical and Community Research Award of SIRS , an apex body for work on schizophrenia in Florence, Italy.

#3449

Netha Hussain

#157947

Overall Influence

1990 - Present (36 years)

Netha Hussain is an India-born medical doctor and Wikipedian known for her efforts to tackle the spread of misinformation in Wikipedia about the origin of the coronavirus. Biography Hussain was born on 11 June 1990 in Kunnamangalam in the state of Kerala.

#3450

Sushma Reddy

#190672

Overall Influence

Sushma Reddy is an Indian ornithologist, who serves as chair of ornithology at the Bell Museum of Natural History in the US state of Minnesota, having been made a fellow of the American Ornithological Society in 2018. She discovered one new species and two new genera of birds in the Western Ghats of India.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions