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).
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List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#3551
Tilly Edinger
1897 - 1967 (70 years)
Johanna Gabrielle Ottilie "Tilly" Edinger was a German-American paleontologist and the founder of paleoneurology. Personal life Early life Tilly Edinger was born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1897. Her father, Ludwig Edinger, founded Frankfurt's first neurological research institute, providing Edinger with multiple contacts in the scientific community that helped drive her career. She was the youngest of three siblings. Her brother Fritz was killed during the Holocaust and her sister Dr. Dora Lipschitz emigrated to the United States. As a teenager, Edinger began to lose her hearing. She required hearing aids, and as an adult she was completely deaf and could not hear without them.
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Frieda Robscheit-Robbins
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Frieda S. Robscheit-Robbins was a German-born American pathologist who worked closely with George Hoyt Whipple, conducting research into the use of liver tissue in treatment of pernicious anaemia, co-authoring 21 papers between 1925 and 1930. Whipple received a Nobel Prize in 1934 in recognition of this work, but Robscheit-Robbins was not recognized in this award, although Whipple did share the prize money with her. Had she won the Nobel Prize alongside Whipple, Robscheit-Robbins would have been the second woman after Marie Curie to win the prestigious international award, and the first American woman to do so.
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Mieko Kamiya
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Mieko Kamiya was a Japanese psychiatrist who treated leprosy patients at Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium. She was known for translating books on philosophy. She worked as a medical doctor in the Department of Psychiatry at Tokyo University following World War II. She was said to have greatly helped the Ministry of Education and the General Headquarters, where the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers stayed, in her role as an English-speaking secretary, and served as an adviser to Empress Michiko. She wrote many books as a highly educated, multi-lingual person; one of her books, titled On the Me...
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Rosalind Pitt-Rivers
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Rosalind Venetia Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers FRS was a British biochemist. She became the second president of the European Thyroid Association in 1971; she succeeded Jean Roche and was followed by Jack Gross in this position, all three names inextricably linked with the discovery of the thyroid hormone triiodothyronine .
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Marie Taylor
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Marie Clark Taylor was an American botanist, the first woman to earn a science doctorate at Fordham University, and the Head of the Botany Department at Howard University from 1947 to her retirement in 1976. Her research interest was plant photomorphogenesis.
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Marcella Boveri
1863 - 1950 (87 years)
Marcella Boveri was an American biologist. She was married to the German biologist Theodor Boveri . Their daughter Margret Boveri became one of the best-known post-war German journalists. Life She was born Marcella O'Grady in Boston, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She attended Girls' High School in Boston. She studied with William Thompson Sedgwick at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she became the first woman to receive a degree in biology from MIT. After she completed her post-graduate studies in Harvard University O'Grady worked as an assistant to the zoologist Edmund Beecher Wilson at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
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Sidnie Manton
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Sidnie Milana Manton was an influential British zoologist. She is known for making advances in the field of functional morphology. She is regarded as being one of the most outstanding zoologists of the twentieth century.
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Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker
1901 - 1957 (56 years)
Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker was a British phycologist, known for her research on the edible seaweed Porphyra laciniata , which led to a breakthrough for commercial cultivation. Kathleen Drew-Baker's scientific legacy is revered in Japan, where she has been named Mother of the Sea. Her work is celebrated each year on April 14. A monument to her was erected in 1963 at the Sumiyoshi shrine in Uto, Kumamoto, Japan.
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Evelyn M. Anderson
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Evelyn M. Anderson was an American physiologist and biochemist, most known for her co-discovery of adrenocorticotropic hormone in 1934. Background Evelyn Anderson was born in Willmar, Minnesota, to Swedish immigrants parents. She attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she obtained her bachelor's. In 1928, she gained her M.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Medicine. During her time at Berkeley, her research culminated into two papers about vitamin A and nutrition. She continued on to receive her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Montreal in 1934.
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Dora Jacobsohn
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Dora Elisabeth Jacobsohn was a German-Swedish physiologist and endocrinologist. Considered one of the early pioneers of the field of neuroendocrinology, she is best known for her work with Geoffrey Harris showing that the anterior pituitary gland is controlled by the hypothalamus via the hypophyseal portal system.
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Mary Belle Allen
1922 - 1973 (51 years)
Mary Belle Allen was an American botanist, chemist, mycologist, algologist, and plant pathologist, and a pioneer of biochemical microbiology. With Daniel I. Arnon and F. Robert Whatley, she did breakthrough research discovering and demonstrating the role of chloroplasts in photosynthesis. In 1962 she received the Darbaker Prize from the Botanical Society of America for her work on microbial algae. In 1967 she was nominated jointly with Arnon and Whatley for a Nobel Prize.
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Silvia Zenari
1895 - 1956 (61 years)
Silvia Zenari was an Italian geologist and botanist. Zenari was born in Udine, Italy and studied at the University of Padua, graduating in 1918. While working for the Istituto di Geologia, Zenari studied the Dolomites in Belluno, Cadore, and Comelico between 1930 and 1950, eventually turning her focus on botany as well as geology. She was the first to complete a study on the ecology of plant life at high elevations, primarily in the Sexten Dolomites range. She later moved on to studying the Schiara range, including Monte Serva. Her research included a statistical analysis of plants at various elevations, which explained the distribution of various species.
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Helen Dyer
1895 - 1998 (103 years)
Helen Marie Dyer was an American biochemist and cancer researcher. Her main work concerned the mechanism of carcinogenesis; she also worked with metabolism and nutrition. Life Dyer was born on 26 May 1895 to Florence Robertson Dyer and Joseph E. Dyer in Washington, D.C. Her father owned a wholesale grocery. She had three older siblings. As a young woman, she was uninterested in science; though she took science courses in high school, she was an accomplished athlete. She went to Western High School and was graduated in 1913. She credited her high school teachers for inspiring her scientific studies.
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Lily Newton
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Lily Newton was professor of botany and vice-principal at the University of Wales. Early life and education Newton was born at Pensford in Somerset in 1893, the daughter of George and Melinda Batten. She attended Colston’s Girls' School, Bristol, where she was captain of school. She studied botany at the University of Bristol, where she was awarded the Vincent Stuckey Lean scholarship in botany and graduated with a first class honours degree.
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Tatiana Dobrolyubova
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Tatiana Dobrolyubova was a Russian geologist and paleontologist. Life and work Tatiana Alekseevna Dobrolyubova was born in 1891 in Nizhegorod Province in the Russian Empire. She completed gymnasium in 1909 and was awarded a first-class diploma from the Moscow Higher Women's Courses in 1915. She trained as a teacher at the University of Moscow from 1920 and then became an assistant professor of geology there in January 1922. From 1921 to 1931 Dobrolyubova organized nine large geological survey expeditions to the northern Ural Mountains, but her interests gradually turned to paleontology rather than geology.
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Mary Parke
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Mary Winifred Parke, FRS, was a British marine botanist and Fellow of the Royal Society specialising in phycology, the study of algae. Scientific work Mary Parke contributed a great deal to the study of marine algae, publishing numerous articles on the subject. Her pioneering work on culturing algae in the laboratory may be considered her most significant contribution. She discovered that the flagellate Isochrysis galbana was ideal for feeding oyster larvae; cultures of this species are used for fish farming and in research laboratories throughout the world. Most researchers and fish farmers...
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Emily Ray Gregory
1863 - 1946 (83 years)
Emily Ray Gregory was an American zoologist who is best known as holding the American Women's Table at the Naples Zoological Station and her work with the United States War Trade Board and the United States Treasury Department.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Emily Lovira Gregory
1841 - 1897 (56 years)
Emily Lovira Gregory was an American botanist born in Portage, New York. She began her educational career by receiving her Bachelor's of Arts from Cornell University in 1881, later earning a Ph.D. at the University of Zurich. This made her one of the first American women to earn a doctoral degree from a university in Europe. Gregory often found it difficult to find paid academic positions. She often would take on the unpaid positions because she could support herself. From 1890 to 1895 at the University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College she worked as a teaching fellow and lecturer respectively.
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Helen Chambers
1879 - 1935 (56 years)
Helen Chambers CBE was a British pathologist and cancer expert whose findings on radium were essential in the fight against cervical cancer. Early life Chambers was born in Bombay, India, to Frederick Chambers. Her father was a member of the Indian Civil Service before returning the family back to Britain.
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Mary Isabel McCracken
1866 - 1955 (89 years)
Mary Isabel McCracken was an American entomologist, researcher and teacher. Career McCracken was born in Oakland, California in 1866. She began her teaching career at Oakland’s public schools. After a decade of teaching and at the age of 34 she enrolled at Stanford University.
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Susan Hallowell
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Susan Hallowell was an American botanist and Professor of Botany at Wellesley College. She was a teacher and mentor of botanist Margaret Clay Ferguson. Life Hallowell began a teaching career shortly after graduating from Colby College.
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Carmel Humphries
1909 - 1986 (77 years)
Carmel Humphries MRIA B.Sc. M.Sc. PhD D.Sc. was an Irish zoologist, specialist in fresh water Chironomidae. She was the first female professor of zoology and head of department in Ireland, and devised a technique for the identification of chironomid flies that is still employed today.
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Lydia DeWitt
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Lydia Maria DeWitt was an American pathologist and anatomist. Early life and education Lydia Maria Adams was born in Flint, Michigan to Oscar and Elizabeth Adams, the second of three children. Her father was an attorney. Elizabeth died when Lydia was five, leaving her sister, who later married Oscar, to raise Lydia and her siblings.
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Alice Haskins
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Alice Crane Haskins Swingle was an American government botanist. With her husband, botanist Deane Bret Swingle , she co-authored the 1928 book A Textbook of Systematic Botany. Life and career Haskins was born on 24 April 1880, in Acton, Massachusetts to Helen A. Crane and John R. Haskins. She graduated with a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1903. Haskins worked as a research assistant in the Plant Pathology Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture from 1903 to 1906.
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Elsie M. Burrows
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
Elsie May Burrows was an English botanist who made significant contributions to British postwar phycology. Her primary area of research was macroalgal ecology, focusing particularly on Fucus, a genus of brown algae, and Chlorophyta, a division of the green algae.
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Cornelia Channing
1938 - 1985 (47 years)
Cornelia "Nina" Channing was an American professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her research focused on endocrinology and fertility; along with longtime collaborators Neena Schwartz and Darrell Ward, she was involved in the discovery of hormones involved in regulating the female reproductive cycle. She died of breast cancer in 1985.
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Anna Kharadze
1905 - 1971 (66 years)
Anna Kharadze was a Soviet Georgian biologist, systematist, florist, botanist-geographer, collector, a specialist in the flora of Georgia and the Caucasus as a whole. Early life and education Anna Kharadze was born in the city of Elizavetpole in the family of a school teacher of natural sciences. She received her secondary education at a technical school in Tbilisi and then entered the biological department of the natural faculty of Tbilisi State University, from which she graduated in 1927.
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Ethel Ronzoni Bishop
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Ethel Ronzoni Bishop was an American biochemist and physiologist. Early life and education Ethel Ronzoni was born in California. She earned her BS degree from Mills College in 1913, her Master's from Columbia University in 1914, and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1923.
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Tatiana Krasnoselskaia
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Tatiana Krasnoselskaia was a botanist specializing in plant physiology from the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. Life Tatiana Abramovna Krasnoselskaia was born on 1 January 1884 in St Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire. She studied physics and mathematics in the Bestuzhev Courses, graduating in 1904. She was an assistant professor at the St Petersburg Agricultural Courses and then became an assistant professor at the Bestuzhev Courses from 1909 to 1914. While teaching Krasnoselskaia earned her M.A. at Saint Petersburg Imperial University in 1912. Two years later she moved to...
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Elizabeth C. Miller
1920 - 1987 (67 years)
Elizabeth Cavert Miller was an American biochemist, known for fundamental research into the chemical mechanism of cancer carcinogenesis, working closely with her husband James A. Miller. Biography Miller was the daughter of an economist at the Federal Land Bank in Minneapolis. She studied biochemistry at the University of Minnesota . In 1945 she received her doctorate under Carl Baumann as a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Scholar. As a postgraduate, she worked at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she and her husband James A. Miller studied chemical carcinogenesis.
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Elzada Clover
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Elzada Clover was an American botanist who was the first to catalog plant life in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. She and Lois Jotter became the first two women to raft the entire length of the Grand Canyon.
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Winifred Goldring
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Winifred Goldring , was an American paleontologist whose work included a description of stromatolites, as well as the study of Devonian crinoids. She was the first woman in the nation to be appointed as a State Paleontologist.
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Agnes Claypole Moody
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Agnes Mary Claypole Moody was an American zoologist and professor of natural science. Early life and education Agnes Mary Claypole Moody was born in Bristol, England to Jane and Edward Waller Claypole. She had a twin sister, Edith Jane Claypole , who was also a biologist. She attended Buchtel College, and in 1894 she attended Cornell University for her master's degree. She completed doctoral work at the University of Chicago in 1896.
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Effie A. Southworth
1860 - 1947 (87 years)
Effie Almira Southworth Spalding , was an American botanist and mycologist, and the first woman plant pathologist hired by the United States Department of Agriculture . Her most important discovery was the 1887 identification of the fungus Colletotrichum gossypii as the cause of cotton cankers, a disease which killed thousands of acres of cotton and was a major economic threat. She taught botany at several institutions, worked at the Desert Botanical Laboratory with her husband, and established the Botany Department Herbarium at the University of Southern California.
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Anna Vickers
1852 - 1906 (54 years)
Anna Vickers was a marine algologist and plant collector known principally for her work on algae of the Antilles and the Canary Islands. Biography Anna Vickers was born on 28 June 1852 in Bordeaux, France, though it is likely that her father was British. In 1879–80, she visited Australia and New Zealand with her family, traveling widely and becoming interested in the Maori language. In 1883 she published a monograph about these travels, Voyage en Australie et en Novelle-Zélande. Topics she touched on range from word derivations in the Maori language to the ferns and algae of south Australia. ...
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Sheina Marshall
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Sheina Macalister Marshall was a Scottish marine biologist who dedicated her life to the study of plant and animal plankton. She was an authority on the copepod Calanus. She worked at the Marine Biological Station at Millport, Cumbrae in Scotland from 1922-1964.
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Theodora Lisle Prankerd
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
Theodora Lisle Prankerd was a British botanist who worked on the growth of ferns, and lectured at Bedford College and the University of Reading. Early life and education Theodora Lisle Prankerd was born in Hackney, London, the daughter of general practitioner Orlando Reeves Prankerd and his second wife, Clementina Soares. She attended Brighton High School . She then studied botany Royal Holloway, University of London, first supported by a Founders scholarship, and then a Driver Scholarship, graduating with 1st Class Honours in 1903, at the time headed by Margaret Jane Benson.
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Eleanor Albert Bliss
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Eleanor Albert Bliss was an immunologist who made significant advancements to the field of immunological research. She was also a dean and professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College. Life and education Eleanor Albert Bliss was born on December 16, 1899, in Jamestown, Rhode Island. Her family lived in Baltimore where her father, William J. Bliss was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Her mother's name was Edith Grantham Bliss who was originally from Pennsylvania. The Bliss family lived in Baltimore for their children's entire childhood.
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Alice Carter Cook
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Alice Carter Cook , , was an American botanist and author whose plant collections are now held by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Cook was the first woman to receive a PhD in botany from an American university.
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Jane Ingham
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Rose Marie "Jane" Ingham was an English botanist and scientific translator. She was appointed research assistant to Joseph Hubert Priestley in the Botany Department at the University of Leeds, and together, they were the first to separate cell walls from the root tip of broad beans. They analysed these cell walls and concluded that they contained protein. She carried out experiments on the cork layer of trees to study how cells function under a change of orientation and found profound differences in cell division and elongation in the epidermal layer of plants.
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Elva Lawton
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Elva Lawton was an American botanist and bryologist known for her research on ferns early in her career and her late-career comprehensive study of the mosses of the Western United States. Early life and education Elva Lawton was born in West Middletown, Pennsylvania on April 3, 1896. Prior to matriculating at university, she was an elementary school teacher in Pennsylvania from 1915 to 1919. She attended the University of Pittsburgh for her bachelor's degree, which she earned in 1923, and her master's degree, which she earned in 1925. From 1923 to 1925 she was also a high school biology and Latin teacher in Crafton, Pennsylvania.
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Ida Maclean
1877 - 1944 (67 years)
Ida Smedley Maclean was an English biochemist and the first woman admitted to the London Chemical Society. Early life and education Ida was born in Birmingham to William Smedley, a businessman, and Annie Elizabeth Duckworth. She was taught by her mother at home until the age of nine and lived in "a cultured and progressive home". She was educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham from 1886 to 1896, when she won a scholarship and began her studies at Newnham College, Cambridge. In the university's Natural Sciences Tripos she got a first class in part one and a second class in part two, studying chemistry and physiology.
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Edith Grace White
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Edith Grace White was an American zoologist known for her studies of elasmobranchs . She was a professor of biology at Wilson College, and was a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
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Gladys Dick
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Gladys Rowena Henry Dick was an American physician who co-developed an antitoxin and vaccine for scarlet fever with her husband, George F. Dick. Biography Gladys Rowena Henry was born in Pawnee City, Nebraska in 1881 and earned her B.S. in zoology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1900. She was a member of the Pi Beta Phi chapter at the University of Nebraska. Because her mother initially objected to Gladys attending medical school, she took graduate classes at Nebraska until 1903, then moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Graduated in 1907 with her M.D., she then trained for a year at the University of Berlin.
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Mary Sophie Young
1872 - 1919 (47 years)
Mary Sophie Young was a botanist at the University of Texas significant for her field trips where she collected large quantities of specimens making her a key contributor to plant taxonomy in Texas.
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Erna Mohr
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Erna W. Mohr was a German zoologist who made contributions to ichthyology and mammalogy. Mohr was long associated with the Zoological Museum Hamburg, where she was successively head of the Fish Biology Department, Department of Higher Vertebrates, and Curator of the Vertebrate Department. She was a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and held an honorary doctorate from the University of Munich.
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Elizabeth Ann Bartholomew
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Elizabeth Ann Bartholomew was an American botanist dedicated to the study of plant systematics. Early life Bartholomew was born on June 14, 1912, in Wheeling, West Virginia. Influenced by her naturalist father, she became interested in the natural sciences at a young age. When she was 12 Bartholomew joined the Girl Scouts, and she subsequently earned all of the nature badges. After high school, Bartholomew attended West Virginia University. She became interested in botany during her freshman year after taking a class taught by Perry Daniel Strausbaugh.
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