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,
#3551
Adah Elizabeth Verder
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Adah Elizabeth Verder was an American medical bacteriologist and science administrator. She was a researcher in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' intramural research program specialized in gastrointestinal flora and staphylococci, pseudomonas, and pleuropneumonia organisms. Verder later served as chief of the bacteriology and mycology branch in the extramural division of NIAID. She was a fellow of several societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Public Health Association, American Academy of Microbiology, and the New York ...
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Gerta von Ubisch
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Gerta von Ubisch was a German physicist, geneticist, and botanist. She studied barley and found a genetic explanation for heterostyly. In 1933 she lost her position at Heidelberg University because of her Jewish heritage.
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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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Clara Eaton Cummings
1855 - 1906 (51 years)
Clara Eaton Cummings was an American cryptogamic botanist and Hunnewell Professor of Cryptogamic Botany at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Life and education Cummings was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire, on July 13, 1855 to Noah Conner and Elmira George Cummings. In 1876, she enrolled at the women's liberal arts college Wellesley, only one year after the opening of the institution.
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Marie Agnes Hinrichs
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Marie Agnes Hinrichs Ph.D., M.D. was an American scientist specializing in zoology, physiology, and physical health. She earned a Ph.D. in zoology in 1923, conferred from the University of Chicago. She taught at the University of Chicago, before moving on to direct departments at Southern Illinois University and University of Illinois. She became known for her research into the effects of both ultraviolet radiation and visible radiation on living matter, with particular interest in the effects on developing embryos.
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Ada Hayden
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Ada Hayden was an American botanist, educator, and preservationist. She was the curator of the Iowa State University Herbarium, which was renamed the Ada Hayden Herbarium in her honour in 1988. During her career, she added more than 40,000 specimens to the herbarium. Her studies and conservation work were particularly important in ensuring the preservation of the tallgrass prairie.
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Nora Lilian Alcock
1874 - 1972 (98 years)
Nora Lilian Alcock, also known as Nora Lilian Lepart and Nora Lilian Leopard, was a pioneer in the field of plant pathology and the first government-appointed plant pathologist in Scotland. Life Nora Lilian Scott was born in 1874, the daughter of Sir John Scott, the Judicial Advisor to the Khedive of Egypt, and Edgeworth Leonora Hill. It appears she had no formal higher education. She married Nathaniel Henry Alcock, a radiologist, in 1905 and moved to Canada. When he died of cancer in 1913, she and her four children returned to Britain.
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Una Lucy Fielding
1888 - 1969 (81 years)
Una Lucy Fielding was an Australian neuroanatomist. Early life Una Fielding was born in Wellington, New South Wales to Anglican clergyman and author Rev. Sydney Glanville Fielding and his wife Lucy Frances . The eldest of six children, Una attended a private school in Windsor before starting at St Catherine's School, Waverley in 1900. In 1907 she won a bursary to the University of Sydney; after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1910 she spent six years teaching French and English.
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Marie Poland Fish
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Marie "Bobbie" Dennis Poland Fish was an American oceanographer and marine biologist known for her bioacoustics research and the finding of eel eggs in the Sargasso Sea. Her research on underwater sound detection allowed the United States Navy to distinguish enemy submarines from wildlife. The United States Navy awarded her its highest civilian award, the Distinguished Service Medal, in 1966 to recognize her contributions during her twenty-two years leading the "Underwater Sound of Biological Origin" project for the Office of Naval Research. She also founded the Narragansett Marine Laboratory with her husband Charles.
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Rhoda Erdmann
1870 - 1935 (65 years)
Rhoda Erdmann was a German cell biologist. Working in the early 1900s, Erdmann was a pioneer of cellular biology and one of few women in her field at the time. Erdmann's work centered around the reproduction of protozoa, with a particular interest in tissue culture and in vitro cellular reproduction. Her work as a protozoologist earned her a graduate student lecturing position at Yale University, though her time in America was cut short by anti-German sentiment surrounding World War I. After a forcible incarceration and then deportation in 1919, Erdmann took a research position at the Institute for Cancer Research at the Charité Hospital of the Friedrich‐Wilhelms University of Berlin.
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Ann Haven Morgan
1882 - 1966 (84 years)
Ann Haven Morgan was an American zoologist and ecologist. Biography One of three children of Stanley G. Morgan and Julia A. Douglass Morgan, Anna Morgan was born in Waterford, Connecticut and attended Williams Memorial Institute in New London, Connecticut. In 1902, Anna joined Wellesley College then transferred to Cornell University. After receiving a B.A in 1906, she worked as an assistant and instructor for the Mount Holyoke College department of zoology until 1909. At Cornell University, she was awarded a Ph.D. in 1912 with a dissertation titled, A Contribution to the Biology of the May-fly, after which she became a professor at Mount Holyoke College.
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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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Dorothy van Dyke Leake
1893 - 1990 (97 years)
Dorothy Van Dyke Leake was an American botanist, botanical illustrator, educator, writer and conservationist. In retirement, she became known for her efforts to preserve the Crane Creek area in northwest Stone County, Missouri.
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Miriam Lucile Bomhard
1898 - 1952 (54 years)
Miriam Lucile Bomhard was a conservationist and botanist from the United States of America. She was the first woman to receive a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Early life Bomhard was born in Bellevue, Kentucky, the daughter of the Reverend W.A. Bomhard and Emma Koch Bomhard. The family moved to Pittsburgh in 1907. In 1917, She graduated as valedictorian of her high school.
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Helen Thompson Gaige
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Helen Beulah Thompson Gaige was an American herpetologist, curator of Reptiles and Amphibians for the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, and a specialist in neotropical frogs. Gaige was born in Bad Axe, Michigan, and studied at the University of Michigan with Frank Nelson Blanchard, under professor Alexander Grant Ruthven. From 1910 until 1923 she was an assistant curator of reptiles and amphibians for the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan. In 1923 she became curator of amphibians. In 1928, she co-authored The Herpetology of Michigan with Ruthven. In 1937 she becam...
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Louella E. Cable
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Louella E. Cable was an American ichthyologist. Biography Louella E. Cable was born in Chamberlain, South Dakota on July 5, 1900. She received a teacher's certificate from Dakota Wesleyan University and B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of South Dakota.
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Marion Edwena Kenworthy
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Marion Edwena Kenworthy, M.D. , an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, introduced psychiatric and psychoanalytic concepts to the education of social workers and to the field of social work. Life She was born in Hampden, Massachusetts. She entered Tufts Medical School in 1908 at the age of 17, and graduated cum laude with a medical degree in 1913. She accepted an appointment at the Gardner State Hospital in Massachusetts, the first woman ever on the hospital medical staff. After three years, she moved to the Foxborough State Hospital in Massachusetts. Her weekends and vacations were spent ...
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Hélène Sparrow
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Hélène Sparrow , was a Polish medical doctor and bacteriologist. She is best known for her work on the control of many epidemics including: typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and smallpox. Throughout the 1920s, Sparrow worked with the Polish Armed Forces at the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw. While at the State Institute of Hygiene, she worked vigilantly to produce the first vaccine against typhus and ran several large-scale vaccination campaigns to control the spread of diphtheria and scarlet fever all along the eastern frontiers of Poland. In 1933, Sparrow began to study flea-borne and...
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Angela Agostini
1880 - 2000 (120 years)
Angela Agostini was an Italian botanist and mycologist who conducted research at the Botanical Institute of the University of Pavia.
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Mary K. Bryan
1877 - 1926 (49 years)
Mary Katherine Bryan was an American botanist and phytopathologist. Much of her research involved leaf spots and cankers caused by bacteria. Life and career Bryan was born in Prince George's County, Maryland, on February 13, 1877. She earned a bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 1908. She worked at the Bureau of Plant Industry in the United States Department of Agriculture as a scientific assistant and assistant pathologist from 1909 to 1918.
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Janina Hurynowicz
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Janina Hurynowicz was a Polish medical doctor, neurophysiologist and neurologist. She was the author of many works on Chronaxie and the influence of insulin on the autonomic nervous system and became a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
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Helen Hart
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Helen Hart was an American plant pathologist, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Hart was the first woman president of the American Phytopathological Society, and was instrumental in making the University of Minnesota's Department of Plant Pathology a world-leader in stem rust.
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Anna Charlotte Ruys
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Anna Charlotte Ruys or Charlotte Defresne-Ruys was a Dutch professor of bacteriology and epidemiology. She became a proponent of hygiene in public health and an activist against biological warfare. Early life and education Ruys was born in Dedemsvaart as a daughter of Bonne Ruys and Engelina Gijsberta Fledderus. Her younger sister, Mien, became a landscape architect and carried on their father's work.
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Lina Stern
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Lina Solomonovna Stern was a Soviet biochemist, physiologist and humanist whose medical discoveries saved thousands of lives at the fronts of World War II. She is best known for her pioneering work on the blood–brain barrier, which she described as hemato-encephalic barrier in 1921.
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Elisabeth Ivanovna Steinberg
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Elisabeth Ivanovna Steinberg was a Soviet botanist noted for studying the plants of North Asia, including Russia and Kazakhstan. She worked at Tomsk State University and St. Petersburg State University. During the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War, she was among those protecting the Peterhof Natural Science Institute.
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Margaret Newton
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Margaret Brown Newton was a Canadian plant pathologist and mycologist internationally renowned for her pioneering research in stem rust Puccinia graminis, particularly for its effect on the staple Canadian agricultural product wheat.
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Florence B. Seibert
1897 - 1991 (94 years)
Florence Barbara Seibert was an American biochemist. She is best known for identifying the active agent in the antigen tuberculin as a protein, and subsequently for isolating a pure form of tuberculin, purified protein derivative , enabling the development and use of a reliable TB test. Seibert has been inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame and the National Women's Hall of Fame.
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Mary Alice Willcox
1856 - 1953 (97 years)
Mary Alice Willcox was an American zoologist and professor at Wellesley College. Early life and education In 1856, Mary was born in Kennebunk, Maine, the eldest of three children of the congregational minister William H. Willcox and his wife Annie Holmes née Goodenow. Theirs was a distinguished family in Maine; her great grandfather, John Holmes, was one of the state's first senators, while her grandfather, Daniel Goodenow, was justice of the Supreme Court of Maine. Her brother, Walter Francis Willcox, became professor of economics and statistics at Cornell University.
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Chiara Cirelli
#3594
Wilmatte Porter Cockerell
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Wilmatte Porter Cockerell was an American entomologist and high school biology teacher who discovered and collected a large number of insect specimens and other organisms. She participated in numerous research and collecting field trips including the Cockerell-Mackie-Ogilvie expedition. She wrote several scientific articles in her own right, co-authored more with her husband, Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell, and assisted him with his prolific scientific output. She discovered and cultivated red sunflowers, eventually selling the seeds to commercial seed companies. Her husband and her entomologi...
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Norah Lillian Penston
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Norah Lillian Penston was a British botanist and academic administrator. She was principal of Bedford College, University of London, from 1951 to 1964. Early life and education Nora Penston was the daughter of A. J. Penston. She was educated at the Bolton School and St Anne's College, Oxford where she obtained a BA in botany in 1927. She studied under W. O. James, researching the potassium nutrition of potatoes for her DPhil, which she gained in 1930.
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Mary C. Lobban
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Mary Constance Cecile Lobban was a British physiologist who studied circadian rhythms. Lobban was a Senior Demonstrator in Physiology in the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge from 1955 to 1959. From 1959 to 1974 she worked at the National Institute for Medical Research's Hampstead laboratories.
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Nellie M. Payne
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Nellie M. Payne was an American entomologist and agricultural chemist. Her research on insect responses to low temperature had practical agricultural and environmental applications. Early life and education Emily Maria de Cottrell Payne was born in 1900, in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, daughter of James E. Payne Sr. and Mary Emmeline Cottrell Payne. Her father was superintendent of an agricultural station. She had two brothers, Amos and James. She earned a bachelor's and master's degrees in agricultural chemistry and entomology from the Kansas State Agricultural College, and a Ph.D. in 1925 from the University of Minnesota.
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Sally Hughes-Schrader
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Sally Peris Hughes-Schrader was a professor of zoology at Duke University, 1962–1966. Sally P. Hughes was born in Hubbard, Oregon. Hughes was accepted at Columbia University where she majored in protozoology and obtained her M.A. in 1922, completing her Ph.D. at Columbia in 1924. She taught at Bryn Mawr College and later at Columbia University. She was Professor of Zoology and the head of the Biology Department at Barnard College. Hughes performed the first complete dissection of the cranial nerves of the dogfish and made studies of hapoidy, parthenogenesis, hermaphroditism, and the life cycl...
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Edith Layard Stephens
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Edith Layard Stephens was a South African botanist, a leading authority on algae and fungi, particularly edible and poisonous mushrooms. Early life and education Stephens was born on December 6, 1884 in Cape Town, Cape Colony, as the daughter of Michael Stephens, who was a chief locomotive superintendent of the Cape Government Railways and Annie Hoskyn. In 1901, she matriculated at the Rustenburg School for Girls in Rondebosch, Cape Town. She studied at the South African College and later that year received the Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Cape of Good Hope. In 1906, Stephans...
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Mary Shaw Shorb
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Mary Shaw Shorb , a research scientist, was best known for the development of a bacteriological assay procedure for the chemical compound now known as Vitamin B12. Early years Mary Shaw was born on January 7, 1907, in Wahpeton, North Dakota, about forty miles south of Fargo. Her parents were Mary McKean and Ernest Shaw. The family moved to Caldwell, Idaho when Mary was three years old. She developed an early interest in biology through a neighbor and family friend, Dr. William Judson Boone. Founder and first President of the College of Idaho, Dr. Boone was a well-known botanist, and taught biology at the College.
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