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.
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List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#3501
Dorothea Leighton
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Dorothea Cross Leighton was an American social psychiatrist and a founder of the field of medical anthropology. Leighton held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina and she was the founding president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She and her husband, Alexander Leighton, wrote The Navajo Door, which has been described as the first written work in applied medical anthropology.
Go to Profile#3502
Margaret Oakley Dayhoff
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
Margaret Belle Dayhoff was an American physical chemist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff was a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center and a noted research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, where she pioneered the application of mathematics and computational methods to the field of biochemistry. She dedicated her career to applying the evolving computational technologies to support advances in biology and medicine, most notably the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases and tools to interrogate the databases. She originated one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations .
Go to Profile#3503
Agnes Arber
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Agnes Arber FRS was a British plant morphologist and anatomist, historian of botany and philosopher of biology. She was born in London but lived most of her life in Cambridge, including the last 51 years of her life. She was the first woman botanist to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society and the third woman overall. She was the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society of London for her contributions to botanical science.
Go to Profile#3504
Agnes Fogo
Agnes B. Fogo is a professor of renal pathology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Biography Fogo graduated from the University of Oslo, Norway, and the University of Tennessee, USA. She completed her M.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine before going on to do residency and a fellowship in renal pathology.
Go to Profile#3505
Mary Beckerle
Mary C. Beckerle is an American cell biologist who studies cancer at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah School of Medicine. At Huntsman Cancer Institute, she serves as the CEO and also as Associate Vice President for Cancer Affairs at the University of Utah. Beckerle's research helped to define a novel molecular pathway for cell motility, and more recently, she has begun research into Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric bone cancer. Beckerle's lab made a ground breaking discovery in regards to Ewing's Sarcoma in relation to the EWS/FLI protein. Her lab discovered EWS/FLI to disru...
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Mary Locke Petermann
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Mary Locke Petermann was an American cellular biochemist known for her key role in the discovery and characterization of animal ribosomes, the molecular complexes that carry out protein synthesis. She was the first woman to become a full professor at Cornell University's medical school.
Go to Profile#3507
Grace Medes
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Grace Medes was an American biochemist, who discovered tyrosinosis—a metabolic disorder today known as tyrosinemia—and studied fatty acid metabolism. She was awarded the Garvan-Olin Medal in 1955 for her work.
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Arda Green
1899 - 1958 (59 years)
Arda Alden Green was an American biochemist who co-discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin and discovered the reaction responsible for firefly bioluminescence. She is also known for contributing to Gerty Cori and Carl Cori's elucidation of the Cori cycle and showing how pH affects hemoglobin's ability to bind and transport oxygen. She received the Garvan-Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society for her work.
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Dorothea Rudnick
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Dorothea Rudnick was an American embryologist, who also made contributions as a scientific editor and translator. Early life and education Dorothea Rudnick was born in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin in 1907, and was raised in Chicago, Illinois. Her father Paul Rudnick was chief chemist for Armour Laboratories, and both of her brothers became physicists. As a student at Parker High School she won the $2500 grand prize in an essay contest sponsored by the Chicago Daily Tribune.
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Grace E. Pickford
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Grace Evelyn Pickford was an American biologist and endocrinologist, known for "devising ingenious instruments and techniques" and her work on the hematology and endocrinology of fishes. Life and career Pickford was born in Bournemouth, England, in 1902. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge University, where she was a founding member of the Cambridge University Biological Tea Club. She received the equivalent of a B.A., a "National Sciences Tripos, Pt.I", since Cambridge University did not grant B.A.s to women at that time. She then traveled to South Africa, collecting and studying earth worms .
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Virginia Kneeland Frantz
1896 - 1967 (71 years)
Virginia Kneeland Frantz was a pathologist and educator credited with a series of discoveries in the study of thyroid, breast and pancreatic tumors. Early life and education She was born in New York City, the daughter of Yale and Anna Ilsley Ball Kneeland. Frantz graduated from the Brearley School and Bryn Mawr College . She then pursued medical studies at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating in 1922. In 1920, she married fellow student Angus Macdonald Frantz. They had three children.
Go to Profile#3512
Jean Clark Dan
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Jean Clark Dan née Clark was an American embryologist who pioneered research into the acrosomal reaction. Born in 1910 to a family of staunch Presbyterians in Westfield, New Jersey, Jean Clark Dan graduated from Wilson College in Pennsylvania in 1932 where she studied biology. She pursued her graduate studies in invertebrate zoology at the University of Pennsylvania and spent her summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. At the Marine Biological Laboratory she met her future husband and scientific collaborator Katsuma Dan, the son of a prominent Japanese statesman.
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Dorothy Bliss
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Dorothy Elizabeth Bliss was an American carcinologist and curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History, with which she was associated for over 30 years. She was known as a pioneer in the field of hormonal control in crustaceans. She was editor-in-chief of the 10-volume series The Biology of Crustacea, and author of the popular book Shrimps, Lobsters and Crabs. She served as president of the American Society of Zoologists and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#3514
Maud Slye
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Maud Caroline Slye was an American pathologist who was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A historian of women and science wrote that Slye "'invented' genetically uniform mice as a research tool." Her work focused on the heritability of cancer in mice. She was also an advocate for the comprehensive archiving of human medical records, believing that proper mate selection would help eradicate cancer. During her career, she received multiple awards and honors, including the gold medal of the American Medical Association in 1914, in 1915 the Ricketts Prize, and the gold medal of the American Radiological Society in 1922.
Go to Profile#3515
Ruth Lyttle Satter
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Ruth Lyttle Satter was an American botanist best known for her work on circadian leaf movement. Biography Ruth Lyttle Satter was born March 8, 1923, in New York City as Ruth Lyttle. Satter received a B.A. in mathematics and physics from Barnard College in 1944. After graduating, she worked at Bell Laboratories and Maxson Company. In 1946 she married Robert Satter and in 1947 she became a homemaker, devoting herself to raising her and Robert's four children, Mimi, Shoshana, Jane and Dick. While raising her children, her love of plants led her to complete the New York Botanical Garden's horticu...
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Helen Spurway
1917 - 1978 (61 years)
Helen Spurway was a British biologist and the second wife of J. B. S. Haldane. She emigrated to India in 1957 along with him and conducted research in field biology with Krishna Dronamraju, Suresh Jayakar, and others. Sometimes known as Helen Spurway-Haldane.
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Deborah Rabinowitz
1947 - 1987 (40 years)
Deborah Rabinowitz was an ecologist who coined the seven meanings of rarity in the field of plant ecology,. She was a professor in the Section of Ecology and Systematics at Cornell University. Early life and education Rabinowitz was born and raised in Willimantic, Connecticut, to Louis and Margaret Rabinowitz. She attended public schools and later received her undergraduate degree in biology from New College of Florida in Sarasota. In 1975, she received her Ph.D. in theoretical population biology from the University of Chicago.
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Miriam Augusta Palmer
1878 - 1977 (99 years)
Miriam Augusta Palmer was an American professor of entomology and zoology, scientific artist and sculptor. Biography Miriam Augusta Palmer was born on August 28, 1878, in Mont Clare, United States of America. She graduated from the University of Kansas. After completing her master's degree in 1904, she joined as a scientific illustrator at the experiment station of the Colorado Agricultural College, now known as Colorado State University, and continued until 1928.
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Mary Jane Guthrie
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Mary Jane Guthrie was an American zoologist and cytologist known for her studies of cytoplasm in reproductive and endocrine cells. Early life and education Guthrie was born in New Bloomfield, Missouri. She graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor's degree in 1916 and a master's degree in 1918, then earned her Ph.D. in zoology at Bryn Mawr College in 1922. While working towards her Ph.D., Guthrie served as a zoology instructor and demonstrator.
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Sarah Bedichek Pipkin
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
Sarah Craven Bedichek Pipkin was an American geneticist. Education Pipkin earned her B.A. in Zoology and Ph.D in Genetics from the University of Texas, where she studied with J. T. Patterson and H. J. Muller. She was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship to King's College, London and studied under J. B. S. Haldane.
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Vera Danchakoff
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Vera Mikhaĭlovna Danchakoff was an anatomist, cell biologist and embryologist from the Russian Empire. In 1908 she was the first woman in Russian Empire to be appointed as a professor and she became a pioneer in stem cell research. She emigrated to the United States in 1915 where she was a leading exponent of the idea that all types of blood cell develop from a single type of cell. She has sometimes been called "the mother of stem cells". She later returned to Europe to continue with her research.
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Hally Jolivette Sax
1884 - 1979 (95 years)
Hally Delilia Mary Jolivette Sax , was an American botanist known for her work on the chromosomal structure of plant species and how it is affected by radiation and other mutagens. Biography Hally Jolivette received her A.B. in 1906 and her A.M. in 1909 — both from the University of Wisconsin — and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1912. She taught at the University of Wisconsin , Stanford , and Washington State College . While at the latter institution, she met and in 1915 married the botanist Karl Sax, one of her cytology students. They later had three sons.
Go to Profile#3523
Winifred Cullis
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Winifred Cullis was a physiologist and academic, and the first woman to hold a professorial chair at a medical school. Early life and education Born in Gloucester, Winifred was the youngest daughter of the six children of Frederick John and Louisa Cullis. Her brother Cuthbert Edmund Cullis became a mathematician. The family moved to Birmingham in 1880. She was initially educated at a middle school, the Summer Hill School, and at 16 transferred to the associated King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham and took extra science classes at Mason College.
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Ragna Rask-Nielsen
1900 - 1998 (98 years)
Ragna Marie Jenny Rask-Nielsen née Jensen was a Danish biochemist and medical researcher. After she earned a PhD with a dissertation on the development of carcinogenic tumors in mice in 1948, she carried out laboratory-based studies on antibody-producing tumors. In 1963, her groundbreaking work on viruses causing cancerous lymphoma was published in the journal Nature. When she died at the age of 97, she left her large fortune to a research foundation.
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Rosalind Wulzen
1886 - Present (140 years)
Rosalind Wulzen was an American physiologist, known for her discovery of the "Anti-Stiffness Factor," or "Wulzen Factor." Born in Oakland, California, Wulzen attended the University of California Berkeley for her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.
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Angélique Arvanitaki
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Angélique Arvanitaki was a French neurophysiologist who did research on the electrical activity of neurons using the large nerve fibres of several different molluscs. Life Angélique Arvanitaki was of Greek origin and was born in Cairo on 11 July 1901. In 1942, she married Nick Chalazonitis, who was a student in veterinary medicine at the time, and would himself become a neurophysiologist too. Their daughter Alcmene Chalazonitis, born in 1943, later also became a neuroscientist.
Go to Profile#3527
Helen Margaret Gilkey
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Helen Margaret Gilkey was an American mycologist and botanist, as well as a botanical illustrator and watercolor artist She was born on March 6, 1886, in Montesano, Washington, and moved to Corvallis, Oregon, with her family in 1903. She died in 1972 at the age of 86.
Go to Profile#3528
Margaret Clay Ferguson
1863 - 1951 (88 years)
Margaret Clay Ferguson was an American botanist best known for advancing scientific education in the field of botany. She also contributed on the life histories of North American pines. Early life and education Ferguson was born in Orleans, New York in 1863 and attended the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York. Ferguson attended Wellesley College, where she graduated in botany and chemistry in 1891, earning a PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1901.
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Elizabeth Eaton Morse
1864 - 1955 (91 years)
Elizabeth Eaton Morse was an American mycologist. Born in Framingham, Massachusetts, she graduated from Ashland, Massachusetts, High School in 1882. For seven years she taught in elementary school before entering Wellesley College, from which she graduated with a diploma from the School of Art in 1891. After twenty years of teaching in the New York City schools Morris High School and Roosevelt High School, she returned to Wellesley College in 1924 and earned a degree in Botany in 1926. Shortly after, she registered as a part-time graduate student in the Department of Botany at the University ...
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Margery C. Carlson
1892 - 1985 (93 years)
Margery Claire Carlson was an American botanist and a professor at Northwestern University. After earning a Ph.D. in botany and becoming the first full-time female professor at Northwestern, she went on a number of international scientific expeditions to Central America in order to collect plant specimens and find new species. Her relationship as a research assistant at the Field Museum of Natural History meant that a majority of her plant collection was donated to the museum and a special botany collection was created for her there. Carlson had a long history of involvement in the conservati...
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Doris Holmes Blake
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Doris Holmes Blake, née Doris Mildred Holmes , was an American entomologist and scientific illustrator. She was an expert on chrysomelidae . Life Doris Holmes was raised in a middle-class family in Stoughton, Massachusetts. She earned a B.A. from Boston University in 1913 and an M.A. in Zoology and Psychology from Radcliffe College in 1917. While at Boston University she became a member of Alpha Delta Pi. Marrying the botanist and plant taxonomist Sidney Fay Blake in 1918, she worked for the Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of Agriculture from 1919 to 1928. From 1928 she worked at the Department of Entomology of the United States National Museum.
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Helen Blackler
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Margaret Constance Helen Blackler was a British phycologist, botanical collector and museum curator. Career Blackler was Assistant Keeper of Botany at Liverpool Museum between 1933 and 1945. She also had some temporary teaching posts at colleges and the universities of Liverpool and Sheffield. In 1947 she moved to an academic post at University of St Andrews. She was a lecturer in botany until 1961 and then promoted to senior lecturer until her retirement in 1968. She continued active laboratory research at the university's Gatty Marine Laboratory until the day before her death.
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Ethel Zoe Bailey
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
Ethel Zoe Bailey was a U.S. botanist and the first curator of the Bailey Hortorium at Cornell University from 1935 to 1957. She created the Ethel Z. Bailey Horticultural Catalogue Collection and in 1912 was the first woman in Ithaca, New York to earn a driver's license.
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Muriel Wheldale Onslow
1880 - 1932 (52 years)
Muriel Wheldale Onslow was a British biochemist, born in Birmingham, England. She studied the inheritance of flower colour in the common snapdragon Antirrhinum and the biochemistry of anthocyanin pigment molecules. She attended the King Edward VI High School in Birmingham and then matriculated at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1900. At Cambridge she majored in botany. Onslow later worked within Bateson's genetic group and then Frederick Gowland Hopkins biochemical group in Cambridge, providing her with expertise in biochemical genetics for investigating the inheritance and biosynthesis of petal colour in Antirrhinum.
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Rose Bracher
1894 - 1941 (47 years)
Rose Bracher was a British botanist and academic. She researched the ecology of the mud flats of the River Avon at Bristol and in particular the genus Euglena. Bracher was born in Salisbury and obtained a B.Sc. in 1917, followed by an M.Sc. in 1918 and a Ph.D. in 1927, all from the University of Bristol. She worked as a demonstrator at the London School of Medicine for Women , was a lecturer at the East London College , and took up a post of lecturer at the University of Bristol in 1924 which she held until her death in 1941. Obituaries for Bracher were published in Nature and the Proceedings...
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Edith Philip Smith
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Edith Philip Smith FLS FRSE was a botanist and teacher who became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Head of the Botany Department at Queen's College, Dundee . Career She was one of the first female graduates to receive a degree at the University of Oxford when the first women's graduation ceremony was held there in 1920. She studied at Somerville College, and in June 1920 passed exams in the School of Natural Science with first-class honours, leading to a BA. She then spent a year at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, and undertook research in the plant physiology laboratory at Harvard.
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Emmeline Moore
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Emmeline Moore was an American biologist known for her various articles on fish diseases, as well as pioneering work in conservation and combating water pollution. She earned a PhD in biology from Cornell University in 1916. Moore supervised and edited fourteen watershed reports conducted in New York between 1926 and 1939 and these were the most comprehensive scientific surveys of any states' water resources. She died at a nursing home in Guilderland, New York at the age of 91 following an extended illness.
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Louisa E. Rhine
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Louisa Ella Rhine was an American doctor of botany and is known for her work in parapsychology. At the time of her death, she was recognized as the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences, and has been referred to as the "first lady of parapsychology."
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Ethel I. Sanborn
1883 - 1952 (69 years)
Ethel Ida Sanborn was an American paleobotanist and professor of botany at Oregon State College and University of Oregon. She published extensively on the flora of Oregon and the Western United States.
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Sinaida Rosenthal
1932 - 1988 (56 years)
Sinaida Rosenthal was a German biochemist and molecular biologist. She worked as a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and thereafter, until her death, as department head of the Central Institute for Microbiology at the Berlin based German Academy of Sciences.
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Käthe Voderberg
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Käthe Voderberg née Nehls was a German botanist. She was a professor and the director of the institute for botany at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Life Voderberg studied natural sciences in Hamburg, Berlin, Innsbruck and Greifswald from 1930 to 1935. She finished her doctorate in botany at the University of Greifswald in 1936. In 1947, she habilitated at the University of Greifswald and became a lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Annie May Hurd Karrer
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Annie May Hurd Karrer was an American plant physiologist who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture. Biography Annie May Hurd was born in 1893 in La Conner, Washington. She received an A.B. degree from the University of Washington in 1915 and an M.S. from that institution in 1917. She received her Ph.D. in plant physiology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1918. The same year that she received her doctoral degree, Hurd joined the staff of the United States Department of Agriculture , as a researcher for the Bureau of Plant Industry. She married physicist Sebastian Karrer in 1923.
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Irene McCulloch
1885 - 1987 (102 years)
Irene Agnes McCulloch was a marine biologist and USC biological sciences professor. McCulloch started at the University of Southern California in 1924 where the marine biology research department lacked funding and resources. To better the research being done, McCulloch convinced George Allan Hancock to fund the G. Allan Hancock Foundation for Marine Research, which was then renamed the Hancock Institute for Marine Studies. McCulloch was given her own foundation in 1969 at USC to continue marine biology research. McCulloch studied microbes within the Pacific Ocean with her main focus being fo...
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Maisie Carr
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Maisie Carr was an innovative Australian ecologist and botanist who contributed much to the understanding of the uniqueness of Australian plants and their environmental systems. Foundation years Maisie Carr was born Stella Grace Maisie Fawcett in Footscray, Melbourne. Neither of her parents had a science background but her love of plants was likely fostered by visits to nearby salt-marshes, her grandmother's garden and in nature study classes.
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Marianne Plehn
1863 - 1946 (83 years)
Marianne Plehn was a German zoologist. She was the first woman to be awarded a doctorate at the ETH Zurich and the first woman to be appointed as professor in Bavaria in 1914. Plehn is commemorated in the names of three polyclads and 12 disease agents of fishes. The breadth of her research on diseases of fishes defined the scientific study in this area. She published 114 scientific papers on the subject. She worked with Bruno Hofer and has been honoured as one of the founders of fish pathology.
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Freda Detmers
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Frederica "Freda" Detmers was an American botanist. Life and education Detmers was born in Dixon, Lee County, Illinois, on January 16, 1867, to Henry Detmers and Heimke. Her father was the founder of the Ohio State University Veterinary College. She studied at the University, graduating in 1887 with a B.S. She returned to graduate with an M.S. in 1891.
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Alice Rich Northrop
1864 - 1922 (58 years)
Alice Rich Northrop was an American botanist. She was known for expanding access to nature for New York City's public school children. Northrop traveled extensively to regions of the world where women did not usually venture, including Central America, the Caribbean, and Western North America. On a trip to the Bahamas, she and her husband, John Isaiah Northrop, discovered 18 new species. Her husband was killed in a laboratory accident in 1891, a week before their son was born.
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Ana Aslan
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Ana Aslan was a Romanian biologist and physician of partial Armenian descent, born Anna Aslanyan, specialist in gerontology, academician from 1974 and the director of the National Institute of Geriatrics and Gerontology .
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Jean Hanson
1919 - 1973 (54 years)
Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...
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Margaret Morse Nice
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Margaret Morse Nice was an American ornithologist, ethologist, and child psychologist who made an extensive study of the life history of the song sparrow and was author of Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow . She observed and recorded hierarchies in chicken about three decades ahead of Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who coined the term "pecking order". After her marriage, she made observations on language learning in her children and wrote numerous research papers.
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