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,
#3451
Annamaria Torriani-Gorini
#170232
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Annamaria Torriani-Gorini was an Italian microbiologist best known for her work with bacterial alkaline phosphatase and bacterial physiology. Torriani-Gorini earned her Ph.D. in botany at the University of Milan. She worked at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, had a postdoctoral fellowship at the New York University School of Medicine, was a research associate at Harvard University, and became a professor at MIT. Torriani-Gorini advocated for social and economic justice and promoted women in science. She and her husband Luigi Gorini transformed a house in the Italian Alps into a home for Jewish ...
Go to Profile#3452
Margaret E. Bradshaw
#184351
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Margaret Elizabeth Bradshaw is a long term advocate and recorder of the exceptional flora of Upper Teesdale in County Durham, UK. Her first book was published when she was 97. Early life and education Margaret Elizabeth Bradshaw was born in 1926 and lived with her family on a farm in East Yorkshire. She was interested in plants from childhood. She attended school in Bridlington and later in Leeds. After training as a teacher in Leeds, she taught in Derbyshire and then in Bishop Auckland.
Go to Profile#3453
Maryam Jafarkhani Kermani
#191016
Overall Influence
Maryam Jafarkhani Kermani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Tissue and Cell Culture at the Administration of Agriculture and Biotechnology Research Institute of Iran . She is an Iranian scientist whose main research area is agricultural tissue culture and mainly studies plants in the Rosaceous family.
Go to Profile#3454
Lauren E. Hughes
#117490
Overall Influence
Lauren Elizabeth Hughes is an Australian carcinologist and curator. She specialises in the study of amphipods. Hughes graduated from the University of New England, Armidale with a PhD in 2007. Her thesis was titled "Biodiversity of Amphipods in the Solitary Islands New South Wales, Australia".
Go to Profile#3455
Amanda Reid
#100671
Overall Influence
Amanda "Mandy" Louise Reid is an Australian taxonomist and malacologist. She held the position of collection manager of malacology at the Australian Museum from 2010 to 2023. She is a published researcher and author. Her research has resulted in the description of many species of velvet worms and cephalopods.
Go to Profile#3456
Pat Cragg
#125649
Overall Influence
Patricia Ann Cragg is a New Zealand physiologist and full professor and former academic administrator at the University of Otago. Academic career Cragg graduated from the University of Bristol with a BSc and PhD titled "Respiration and body weight in the reptilian genus Lacerta: A physiological, anatomical and morphometric study".
Go to Profile#3457
Karen Bryan
#90026
Overall Influence
Karen Bryan OBE FRCSLT, is a speech therapist, and Vice Chancellor of York St John University since April 2020. Prior to this, Bryan was Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Greenwich. Career Bryan qualified as a speech and language therapist from the University of Newcastle and also gained her PhD there. Her research interests are in workforce development and the effectiveness of interventions for communication disorders associated with stroke, dementia and other neurological conditions.
Go to Profile#3458
Purity Ngina
#84730
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Purity Ngina is a Kenyan Academician and the Research and Assessment Manager at Zizi Afrique Foundation. Prior to joining Zizi Afrique Foundation Purity was a lecturer at Strathmore University in Nairobi. At age 28, she became Kenyan youngest Doctor of Philosophy graduate in Biomathematics from the same University
Go to Profile#3459
Clara Sousa-Silva
#78132
Overall Influence
Clara Sousa-Silva is a research scientist at Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. Sousa-Silva is an expert on phosphine. She has contributed to investigations of the possibility of life on Venus, working with Jane Greaves and others. Sousa-Silva also directs the Harvard-MIT Student Research Mentoring Program, which pairs high school students with astronomers to conduct research.
Go to Profile#3460
Susanne Kappeler
#72083
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Susanne Kappeler was a lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia and an associate professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al Akhawayn University, and now works as a freelance writer and teacher in England and Germany. Kappeler also taught 'The literary representation of women' in the Faculty of English at Cambridge while a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge and was a part-time tutor for the Open University Course, 'The Changing Experience of Women', and is part of a collective setting up the Cambridge Women's Resources Centre.
Go to Profile#3461
Elin Lerum Boasson
#169413
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Elin Lerum Boasson is a Norwegian environmentalist and was chairman of Natur og Ungdom in 2001 and 2002. She became active in the organisation in 1991, and joined the board in 1997 before she was elected deputy chairman in 1999. She has a Master of Political Science degree from the University of Oslo and has since 2005 worked at Nansen Institute as a researcher .
Go to Profile#3462
Patricia Weerakoon
#162470
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Dr Patricia Kamalini Weerakoon is an Australian Christian sexologist. Dr Weerakoon was born in a Tamil Christian family in Sri Lanka, and grew up on a tea plantation. She is married to Vasantha and they have a son, Kamal, who is a Presbyterian minister. She studied medicine at the University of Colombo, and after her marriage, she moved with her family to Hawaii, where she undertook postgraduate studies at the University of Hawaii. She later obtained a further degree from the University of New South Wales.
Go to Profile#3463
Indira Sharma
#70581
Overall Influence
Indira Sharma is an Indian psychiatrist specialising in child psychiatry and women's mental health. She is a professor and head of the psychiatry department at Banaras Hindu University. In January 2013, she was elected president of the Indian Psychiatric Society.
Go to Profile#3464
Galen McKinley
#186841
Overall Influence
Galen Anile McKinley is a professor at Columbia University and the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory known for her work in the carbon cycle, particularly in the use of models to study the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere.
Go to Profile#3465
Kalyar Platt
#190526
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Kalyar Platt is a Burmese herpetologist and turtle conservationist. She is the director of the Myanmar Program of the Turtle Survival Alliance and oversees conservation, breeding and reintroduction projects for some of Southeast Asia's rarest turtle species. She formerly worked for Wildlife Conservation Society and earned her PhD from Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University in 2007.
Go to Profile#3466
Lucía Spangenberg
#191527
Overall Influence
Lucía Spangenberg is a bioinformatician researcher in Uruguay at the Pasteur Institute of Montevideo and co-founder of the biotech startup GenLives. In 2016, she was named one of the 35 Innovators Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review. She also teaches at the Catholic University of Uruguay.
Go to Profile#3467
Shekinah Elmore
#191616
Overall Influence
Shekinah Elmore is an assistant professor in the department of radiation oncology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. As both a cancer doctor and a self-described "cancer person", she is known for her work in cancer patient advocacy among her fellow physicians and for her public speaking and writing. She has written and spoken publicly about surviving childhood rhabdomyosarcoma in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Go to Profile#3468
Mônica de Toledo-Piza
#191634
Overall Influence
#3469
Jayashri Kulkarni
#87359
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jayashri Kulkarni is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Alfred Health and Monash University who works in the area of women's mental health. She has written about Premenstrual syndrome. She has used hormones to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression in women. She founded and heads the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre, a clinical psychiatry research centre which currently has more than 160 staff and students.
Go to Profile#3470
Chen Wenxin
#144885
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Chen Wenxin was a Chinese biologist specializing in soil microorganisms and bacterial taxonomy, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Some English-language sources cite her as "Wen Xin Chen" or as "Wen-Xin Chen".
Go to Profile#3471
Liu Yan
#188183
Overall Influence
Liu Yan is a Chinese Antarctic researcher best known for her work on iceberg calving. She is an associate professor of geography in the College of Global Change and Earth System Science and Polar Research Institute, Beijing Normal University.
Go to Profile#3472
Sarah Pitt
#191860
Overall Influence
Sarah Jane Pitt is a microbiologist at the University of Brighton and fellow of the Institute of Biomedical Science . She has published three books on biomedical science, parasitology, and clinical microbiology with an emphasis on laboratory practice. She is the IBMS's chief examiner in virology.
Go to Profile#3473
Julia Stewart Lowndes
#187544
Overall Influence
Julia Stewart Lowndes is a marine ecologist and advocate for the open science movement and kinder, better science. The focus of her work is promoting openness to data in the scientific community, and helping fellow researchers learn how to work with open data and the processes surrounding it. She seeks to use this method to promote scientific communities and research.
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Patrice Harris
#51235
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Patrice Harris is an American psychiatrist and the first African-American woman to be elected president of the American Medical Association. She was elected the 174th president in June 2019. Harris is a native of West Virginia and received her Doctor of Medicine degree at West Virginia University. Her practice in psychiatry and public health has been in Atlanta, Georgia.
Go to Profile#3475
Michaela Musilová
#131110
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Michaela Musilová is a Slovak astrobiologist. She is currently the HI-SEAS director. She has commanded over 30 simulated missions to the Moon and Mars. Biography Musilová was born on 11 October 1988 in Bratislava. Her father is a diplomat and her mother is an archeologist.
Go to Profile#3476
Jessie Oliver
#191882
Overall Influence
#3477
Élodie Chabrol
#191958
Overall Influence
#3478
Linda Long
#120909
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Linda Long is a biochemist and musician, who has combined these two fields to create what she terms molecular music. Life Long worked as a biochemist and a Research Fellow in Complementary Medicine at Exeter University, specialising in the fields of homeopathy, herbal medicine and music therapy. Her work has been published in various medical journals, and she is an associate editor of the Journal Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies, published by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. She has been working on molecular music since the 1990s.
Go to Profile#3479
Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse
#109698
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse , also known by her married name Ruth Beuscher, was an American psychiatrist, theologian, and Episcopal priest. Best known for being the psychiatrist of Sylvia Plath, she corresponded with her since they met at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts following Plath's breakdown in 1953. Though Plath destroyed most of their letters, fourteen from Plath to Barnhouse remain .
Go to Profile#3480
Sue Sisley
#64732
Overall Influence
Suzanne A. Sisley is a psychiatrist and former clinical assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. She was terminated from her position for her political activity, and her unethical involvement with a recall campaign against Arizona Senator Kimberly Yee in 2014. She is interested in research into potential medical uses of marijuana for profit through securing an FDA patent on its use, along with other natural remedies.
Go to Profile#3481
Lynika Strozier
#186346
Overall Influence
1984 - 2020 (36 years)
Lynika Strozier was an American researcher and scientist who died from COVID-19 in June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Illinois. Early life Strozier was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but moved to Chicago, with her mother, when she was a toddler. Strozier's mother was a drug addict, who was not able to care for her properly, and her grandmother raised her from age 6. She was diagnosed with a learning disability at age 8 that profoundly affected both reading and math. According to The Chicago Tribune "when she read aloud, it was in such a halting manner that it sometimes sounded like she ...
Go to Profile#3482
Rebecca Lynn Stubbs
#192071
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
#3483
Eleni Antoniadou
#181100
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Eleni Antoniadou is a Greek public figure and scientist. Background Early life and education Eleni Antoniadou was born in 1988 in Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Central Greece and received a master's degree in Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine from University College London.
Go to Profile#3484
Rosalina Berazaín Iturralde
#192093
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Rosalina Berazaín Iturralde is a Cuban botanist, plant collector, plant taxonomist, and professor at the University of Havana. She is one of the founders of the National Botanic Garden of Cuba, and a member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. The species Coccoloba berazainae and Coccoloba berazainiae were named in her honor.
Go to Profile#3485
Maria Orwid
#73557
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Maria Orwid was a Polish psychiatrist and pioneer of Child and Family psychiatry and of Family therapy in Poland. She was a professor of the Jagiellonian University. As a survivor of the Holocaust, she contributed to the literature.
Go to Profile#3486
Rebecca Dorman
#192128
Overall Influence
#3487
Giuliana Furci
#188846
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Giuliana Furci OSI is a field mycologist, speaker, author, and founder and CEO of the Fungi Foundation. She is a Harvard University associate, National Geographic Explorer, Dame of the Order of the Star of Italy, deputy chair of the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee, and author of several titles including a series of field guides to Chilean fungi and co-author of titles such as the 1st State of the World's Fungi and the publication delimiting the term “funga” and the 3F Proposal - Fauna, Flora & Funga. Giuliana has held consulting positions in U.S. philanthropic foundations as well as full-time positions in international and Chilean marine conservation non-profits.
Go to Profile#3488
Kathy Feng-Yi Su
#192148
Overall Influence
Kathy Feng-Yi Su is an entomologist and evolutionary biologist from Singapore. She is an academic researcher, whose work focusses on sexual dimorphism particularly in the family Sepsidae. Research Su is an expert in sexual dimorphism across species and her research in Diptera has shown how it is affected by ecological and molecular mechanisms. As an entomologist she is a leading expert in Sepsidae taxonomy. She is also interested in phylogeny, including the theoretical aspects of sequence data analysis.
Go to Profile#3489
Jennie van Ackeren Dieterle
#192236
Overall Influence
1909 - 1999 (90 years)
Jennie van Ackeren Dieterle was an American botanist, plant collector, curator, university teacher and taxonomist. She collected more than 3,700 plant specimens and identified over 570 of them, the majority from the Cucurbitaceae family. Most of the plants collected came from Mexico and the United States. She identified and named nine previously undescribed species of Cucurbitaceae. She has been recognised for her expertise in this family of plants and had an entire genus of Cucurbitaceae from Mexico named after her, known as Dieterlea.
Go to Profile#3490
Céline Bon
#192243
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
#3491
María Amelia Torres
#192322
Overall Influence
1934 - 2011 (77 years)
María Amelia Torres was an Argentine botanist and agrostologist. She was an authority on the Poaceae family of grasses with an emphasis on the Nassella and the Stipa genera. The Amelichloa genus was named in her honour.
Go to Profile#3492
Sheritta A. Strong
#181848
Overall Influence
Sheritta A. Strong is an American adult psychiatrist and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Strong is a leader in education and advocacy at UNMC, and is the co-director of Medical Student Education in the Department of Psychiatry as well as the Interim Director for Inclusion at UNMC. As a psychiatrist, Strong focuses her clinical attention on treating patients with chronic and persistent mental illness. She is also dedicated to reducing barriers to healthcare access for marginalized populations and she mentors underrepresented scientists and physicians to increase their retention in healthcare.
Go to Profile#3493
Josephine Kane
#184656
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Josephine Kane is a British academic and historian of architecture and the built environment. Publications The architecture of pleasure: British amusement parks 1900-1939 . Ashgate Press.
Go to Profile#3494
Maria Luisa Figueira
#90948
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Maria Luisa Figueira is a Portuguese Consultant psychiatrist, psychiatrist and academic known for her research in clinical and experimental psychopathology and psychopharmacology, particularly in relation to bi-polar disorders and schizophrenia. She is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Lisbon Faculty of Medicine and Head of the Psychiatric Department at the Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon.
Go to Profile#3495
Mary Alice McWhinnie
1922 - 1980 (58 years)
Mary Alice McWhinnie was an American biologist, professor at DePaul University and an authority on krill. From Chicago, Illinois, she was the first woman to sail for two months in Antarctic waters aboard the NSF's research vessel, USNS Eltanin. The National Science Foundation eventually allowed her to winter over at McMurdo Station and in 1974, she became the first American woman to serve as chief scientist at an Antarctic research station.
Go to Profile#3496
Eeva Jalavisto
1909 - 1966 (57 years)
Eeva Jalavisto was a Finnish Professor of physiology and an influential researcher and policy maker in the areas of health and social care of the elderly as well as wider gerontology. Early life and education Born in Kerimäki to Chief Physician Dr and Ines Meurman, Eeva Elmgren completed her secondary education at the Helsingin Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu, graduating in 1927.
Go to Profile#3497
Gabriela Balicka-Iwanowska
1867 - 1962 (95 years)
Gabriela Balicka-Iwanowska was a Polish botanist, activist, and legislator. Her botanical research focused on the plant taxonomy of Iris, Tremandraceae and marine algae. Biography Gabriela Iwanowska was born on 16 May 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, the third daughter of Antoni Iwanowski, a government official, and Sybilla Rosenwerth who hailed from a family of landowners. However, her mother died when Gabriela was a young child, in 1874, and her father died only ten years later, leaving Gabriela and her sisters orphaned but well-off members of Warsaw's social elite.
Go to Profile#3498
Ruth Margery Addoms
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Ruth Margery Addoms , was an American botanist at Duke University specializing in the study of plant anatomy and plant physiology. She contributed to the study of growth-promoting substances in plants.
Go to Profile#3499
Eva Mameli
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Giuliana Luigia Evelina Mameli , was an Italian botanist, and naturalist. A native of Sassari, in Sardinia, in 1906 she moved to Pavia with her brother Efisio Mameli, chemist and pharmacologist at the local university, where in 1907 she graduated in Natural Sciences. In 1915 she obtained the libera docenza. While a junior lecturer at the University of Pavia, she married agronomist Mario Calvino. In 1920 Mario offered Eva Mameli a job as Head of the Botany Department of the Agricultural Experiment Station in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, where the couple went to live and where in 1923 their first child, Italo Calvino, was born.
Go to Profile#3500
Maria von Linden
1869 - 1936 (67 years)
Maria von Linden was a German bacteriologist and zoologist. She was the first woman admitted to study at the University of Tübingen, and became one of the first women in Germany to be given the academic title of “Professor”. She patented a type of bandage and won a prize for her research on butterfly wings. She was driven from office due to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.
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