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,
#351
Ruth Mace
#44193
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ruth Mace FBA is a British anthropologist, biologist, and academic. She specialises in the evolutionary ecology of human demography and life history, and phylogenetic approaches to culture and language evolution. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London.
Go to Profile#352
Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash
#20382
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash is an Iraqi scientist and academic, often demonized as "Mrs. Anthrax" by Anglo-American media for her unproven association with the discontinued Iraqi biological weapons program as a part of the propaganda campaign to justify the Iraq War. Ammash was number 53 on the Pentagon's list of the 55 most wanted, the five of hearts in the deck of most wanted Iraqi playing cards, and the only woman to be featured. She was captured by coalition forces but later released without being charged.
Go to Profile#353
Sandra Wolin
#38829
Overall Influence
Sandra Lynn Wolin is an American microbiologist and physician-scientist specialized in biogenesis, function, and turnover of non-coding RNA. She is chief of the RNA Biology Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute.
Go to Profile#354
Varda Rotter
#66706
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Varda Rotter is a German-born-Israeli cancer researcher. Biography Varda Rotter attended Bar-Ilan University where she studied microbiology for her bachelor's degree and cellular biology for her master's degree . Rotter attended the Weizmann Institute of Science to receive a doctorate in immunology . After completing her studies, Rotter moved to America and became a part of a cancer research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#355
Cathy H. Wu
#41218
Overall Influence
Cathy H. Wu is the Edward G. Jefferson Chair and professor and director of the Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology at the University of Delaware. She is also the director of the Protein Information Resource and the North east Bioinformatics Collaborative Steering Committee, and the adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Medical Center.
Go to Profile#356
Wendy Wintersteen
#47536
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Wendy Wintersteen is an American academic administrator serving as the 16th president of Iowa State University. Education Wintersteen received her bachelor's degree in crop protection from Kansas State University in 1978, and began at Iowa State University the next year, working for Iowa State University Extension in eastern Iowa. Wintersteen was one of the first women hired to work in integrated pest management for ISU Extension. She earned a Ph.D in entomology from ISU in 1988.
Go to Profile#357
Beverley Glover
#62306
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Beverley Jane Glover is a British biologist specialising in botany. Since July 2013, she has been Professor of Plant Systematics and Evolution in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge and director of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.
Go to Profile#358
Barbara Hibbs Blake
#60007
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Barbara Hibbs Blake was an American mammalogist and college professor. Early life Barbara Jo Hibbs was born in Roseburg, Oregon, the daughter of Gordon Reid Hibbs and Marybelle Hauskins Hibbs . Her mother was a nurse. She graduated from Portland State University in 1959, and completed doctoral studies at Yale University in 1967. Her dissertation under entomologist Charles Lee Remington was titled "A comparative study of energy and water conservation throughout the annual cycle in ground dwelling Sciuridae."
Go to Profile#359
Marthe Vogt
#38186
Overall Influence
1903 - 2003 (100 years)
Marthe Louise Vogt was a German scientist recognized as one of the leading neuroscientists of the twentieth century. She is mainly remembered for her important contributions to the understanding of the role of neurotransmitters in the brain, especially epinephrine.
Go to Profile#360
Marian Dawkins
#29750
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Marian Stamp Dawkins is a British biologist and professor of ethology at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include vision in birds, animal signalling, behavioural synchrony, animal consciousness and animal welfare.
Go to Profile#361
Denise Kirschner
#41468
Overall Influence
Denise Ellen Kirschner is an American mathematical biologist and immunologist whose research topics include granulomas, HIV, tuberculosis, and the mechanisms by which disease pathogens interact with and persist in their hosts. She is a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan, co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, and former president of the Society for Mathematical Biology.
Go to Profile#363
Diane Griffin
#62730
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Diane Edmund Griffin is the university distinguished professor and a professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she was the department chair from 1994-2015. She is also the current vice-president of the National Academy of Sciences. She holds joint appointments in the departments of Neurology and Medicine. In 2004, Griffin was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in the discipline of microbial biology.
Go to Profile#364
Gerta Keller
#34250
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Gerta Keller is a geologist and paleontologist who contests the Alvarez hypothesis that the impact of the Chicxulub impactor, or another large celestial body, directly caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Keller maintains that such an impact predates the mass extinction and that Deccan volcanism and its environmental consequences were the most likely major cause, but possibly exacerbated by the impact.
Go to Profile#365
Sarah Elgin
#56194
Overall Influence
Sarah C.R. Elgin is an American biochemist and geneticist. She is the Viktor Hamburger Professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is noted for her work in epigenetics, gene regulation, and heterochromatin, and for her contributions to science education.
Go to Profile#366
Jean Shinoda Bolen
#11261
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Jean Shinoda Bolen is an American psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and author. She is of Japanese descent. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, she is an emeritus clinical professor of psychiatry at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, UCSF Medical Center and member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the author of thirteen books in over one hundred foreign editions. She was an NGO delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women .
Go to Profile#367
Nina Jablonski
#25075
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nina G. Jablonski is an American anthropologist and palaeobiologist, known for her research into the evolution of skin color in humans. She is engaged in public education about human evolution, human diversity, and racism. In 2021, she was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and in 2009, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She is an Evan Pugh University Professor at The Pennsylvania State University, and the author of the books Skin: A Natural History, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color, and the co-author of Skin We Are In.
Go to Profile#368
Maria Elena Bottazzi
#53067
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Maria Elena Bottazzi is an American microbiologist, currently Associate Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, as well as Distinguished Professor of Biology at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. She is editor-in-chief of Springer's Current Tropical Medicine Reports. She and Peter Hotez led the team that designed COVID-19 vaccine Corbevax.
Go to Profile#369
Mary Gehring
#49663
Overall Influence
Mary Gehring is an American plant biologist and epigeneticist who has published extensively on genomic imprinting and demethylation in Arabidopsis thaliana. She has led a laboratory focused on epigenetics at the Whitehead Institute since 2010 and is an associate professor in the biology department at MIT. Gehring graduated from Williams College and received her PhD in 2005 from University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with Robert L. Fischer.
Go to Profile#370
Naomi Datta
#44360
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Naomi Datta, FRS was a distinguished British geneticist. Working at Hammersmith Hospital in the 1950s and early 1960s, she identified horizontal gene transfer as a source of multi-antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
Go to Profile#371
Razelle Kurzrock
#67423
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#372
Adele Diamond
#19596
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Adele Dorothy Diamond is a professor of neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, where she is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. One of the pioneers in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, Diamond researches how executive functions are affected by biological and environmental factors, especially in children. Her discoveries have improved treatment for disorders such as phenylketonuria and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they have impacted early education.
Go to Profile#373
Ana María López Colomé
#49986
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ana María López Colomé is a distinguished Mexican biochemist who won the 2002 L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science – Latin America for her studies on the human retina and the prevention of retinitis pigmentosa and several retinopathies.
Go to Profile#374
Astrid Løken
#57454
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
Astrid Løken was a Norwegian entomologist and member of the Norwegian resistance movement during World War II. Spending most of her career at Bergen Museum, from 1949 to 1979, she was the first female member of the Norwegian Entomological Society, and specialized in the bumblebee genus Bombus.
Go to Profile#375
Hopi Hoekstra
#49549
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Danielle "Hopi" Elizabeth Hoekstra is an evolutionary biologist working at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and serving as the Dean of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her lab uses natural populations of rodents to study the genetic basis of adaptation. She is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She is also the Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a Harvard College Professor. In 2014, Hoekstra became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Go to Profile#376
Sandra Lavorel
#39778
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Sandra Lavorel is a French ecologist specializing in functional ecology. She is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research where she works at the Alpine Ecology Laboratory in Grenoble, France. She has been a member of the French Academy of sciences since 2013 In 2020, she was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2023, she was the recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal.
Go to Profile#377
Naşide Gözde Durmuş
#28773
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Naside Gözde Durmuş is a Turkish scientist and geneticist. She is currently Assistant Professor of Radiology at Stanford University. Her research focuses on nanotechnology and micro-technology applications on current world-threatening health issues, like cancer and antibiotic resistance. In 2015, MIT Technology Review listed her under the category of pioneers in the magazine's list of 35 Innovators Under 35.
Go to Profile#378
Maia Majumder
#34379
Overall Influence
Maimuna Majumder is a computational epidemiologist and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital's Computational Health Informatics Program . She is currently working on modeling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Go to Profile#379
Marcelle Machluf
#20716
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Marcelle Machluf is an israeli biologist. Biography Machluf was born in Morocco and moved to Israel with her mother and grandmother when she was one year old. She grew up in Ashdod. Her mother supported the family as a seamstress and a cleaning lady.
Go to Profile#380
Elaine Mardis
#62278
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Elaine R. Mardis is the co-executive director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children's Hospital, where she also serves as the Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine. She also is professor of pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Mardis’s research focuses on the genomic characterization of cancer and its implications for cancer medicine. She was part of the team that reported the first next-generation-based sequencing of a whole cancer genome, and participated extensively in The Cancer Genome Atlas and the Pediatric Cancer Genome P...
Go to Profile#381
Dorothy Cheney
#32838
Overall Influence
1950 - 2018 (68 years)
Dorothy Leavitt Cheney was an American scientist who studied the social behavior, communication, and cognition of wild primates in their natural habitat. She was Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#382
Jane Maienschein
#31259
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jane Maienschein is an American professor and director of the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. Education Maienschein was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later transferred to Yale University in 1969 where she was a member of Manuscript Society. In 1972, she graduated with honors in History, the Arts, and Letters. She then attended Indiana University to conduct her Ph.D work. Her mentor, Dr. Frederick Churchill, was interested in historical embryological research. Maienschein was awarded a Fellowship at the Smithsonian, to study the history of microscopy.
Go to Profile#383
Lida Holmes Mattman
#62775
Overall Influence
1912 - 2008 (96 years)
Lida Holmes Mattman Ph.D. was an immunologist. She graduated with a M.S. in Virology from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in Immunology from Yale University. Mattman taught in the fields of immunology, microbiology, bacteriology, virology and pathology for over 30 years. She worked at various schools and institutions including Harvard University, Howard Hughes Institute, Oakland University and Wayne State University. She was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences at Wayne State University in Detroit where she was engaged in research and lecturing. She has served...
Go to Profile#384
Elizabeth Kujawinski
#44933
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Kujawinski is an American oceanographer who is Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where she works as Program Director of the Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet. Her research considers analytical chemistry, chemical oceanography, microbiology and microbial ecology. She is interested in what controls the composition of organic materials in aquatic systems.
Go to Profile#385
Maria do Carmo Fonseca
#46965
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Maria do Carmo Fonseca is a Portuguese scientist, full professor of Molecular Cell Biology and Onco-biology at the University of Lisbon Medical School and president of the Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes .
Go to Profile#386
Josephine Pemberton
#62358
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Josephine M. Pemberton is a British evolutionary biologist. She is Chair of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, where she conducts research in parentage analysis, pedigree reconstruction, inbreeding depression, parasite resistance, and quantitative trait locus detection in natural populations. She has worked primarily on long-term studies of soay sheep on St Kilda, and red deer on the island of Rùm.
Go to Profile#387
Petra Levin
#43293
Overall Influence
Petra Anne Levin is an American microbiologist. She is a professor in the department of biology and co-director of the Plant and Microbial Biosciences Graduate Program at Washington University in St. Louis.
Go to Profile#388
Theo Colborn
#19684
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Theodora Emily Colborn was Founder and President Emerita of The Endocrine Disruption Exchange , based in Paonia, Colorado, and Professor Emerita of Zoology at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She was an environmental health analyst, and best known for her studies on the health effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals. She died in 2014.
Go to Profile#389
Janet Iwasa
#39322
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Janet Iwasa is an American data visualization expert and assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah. Early life and education In 1978, Janet Iwasa was born to parents Mikeko and Kuni Iwasa in Bloomington, Indiana. She was the youngest of three children. Following her father joining the National Institutes of Health, she moved, with her family, to Maryland. She later went on to participate in an internship at the Institute for Genomic Research.
Go to Profile#390
Nina Kraus
#58634
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nina Kraus is a professor at Northwestern University, investigating the neural encoding of speech and music and its plasticity where she is the Hugh S. Knowles Chair. Her Auditory Neuroscience Lab, also known as Brainvolts, examines the biological processing of sound throughout the life span, how it is disrupted in clinical populations , and how it reacts to differing levels of expertise . Her work has shown that the hearing brain is vast—engaging our cognitive, sensory, motor, and reward networks. This perspective is illustrated in her book Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World.
Go to Profile#391
Dorothy Otnow Lewis
#5895
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Dorothy Otnow Lewis is an American psychiatrist and author who has been an expert witness at a number of high-profile cases. She specializes in the study of violent individuals and people with dissociative identity disorder , formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Lewis has worked with death row inmates as well as other prison inmates convicted for crimes of passion and violence, and was the director of the DID clinic at Bellevue Hospital, associated with New York University in New York City. She is a professor of psychiatry at Yale and New York University and is the author of Guilty...
Go to Profile#392
Margaret Buckingham
#40373
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Margaret Buckingham, is a British developmental biologist working in the fields of myogenesis and cardiogenesis. She is an honorary professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and emeritus director in the Centre national de la recherche scientifique . She is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Academia Europaea and the French Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#393
Stacey Gabriel
#51375
Overall Influence
Stacey B. Gabriel is an American geneticist and Senior Director of the Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute. With Eric Lander, she is also the co-director of the National Human Genome Research Institute's sequencing center at the Broad Institute. She was named the "hottest researcher" on Thomson Reuters' list of the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014. She was given this honor because she published twenty-three of the most cited papers of 2013, more than any other single researcher recorded by Thomson Reuters. She topped the same list again in 2015. She is also an ISI Highly ...
Go to Profile#394
Alison Gail Smith
#54752
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alison Gail Smith, Lady Hopper is Professor of Plant Biochemistry in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research investigates the metabolism of plants, algae and bacteria, in particular vitamin and cofactor biosynthesis.
Go to Profile#395
Karin Lochte
#65205
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Karin Lochte is a German oceanographer, researcher, and climate change specialist. She was director of German Polar Research Alfred Wegener Institute from 2007 to 2017 as well as chairman of the management committee of Jacobs University Bremen.
Go to Profile#396
Bridget Ogilvie
#30787
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Dame Bridget Margaret Ogilvie, is an Australian and British scientist. Education Ogilvie was born in 1938 at Glen Innes, New South Wales, Australia, to John Mylne and Margaret Beryl Ogilvie. During her primary school years, she had a single teacher, and three other students in her class.
Go to Profile#397
Wendy Raymond
#54059
Overall Influence
Wendy Raymond is the 16th President of Haverford College. She was formerly Vice President for Academic Affairs/Dean of Faculty and a professor of biology at Davidson College. Her research focus is molecular genetics.
Go to Profile#398
Emma Johnston
#35076
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Emma Letitia Johnston is the Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Sydney. She was former, Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales and President of Science & Technology Australia. She is an authority in marine ecology and a former Pro Vice-Chancellor at UNSW.
Go to Profile#399
Maria Manuel Mota
#45695
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Maria Manuel Mota is a Portuguese malariologist and executive director of the Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes, Lisbon. Education Maria Mota, a native of Vila Nova de Gaia, graduated from her undergraduate degree in Biology in 1992 and received her master's degree in immunology in 1994 from the University of Porto. She received her PhD in molecular parasitology in 1998 from University College London, working at the affiliated National Institute for Medical Research with Will Jarra and Anthony Holder.
Go to Profile#400
Alison Goate
#37375
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alison Mary Goate is a professor of neuroscience and Director of the Loeb Center for Alzheimer's Disease at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City. She was previously professor of genetics in psychiatry, professor of genetics, and professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine.
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