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
Mary Foster
1865 - 1960 (95 years)
Mary Louise Foster was an American biochemist, research chemist and educator. Education Mary Louise Foster was born on April 20, 1865, in Melrose, Massachusetts. Between the years of 1878–1883, she attended the Girls' Latin School in Boston, Massachusetts, and later went on to study Classics at Smith College from 1888 to 1891. After her graduation, Foster taught Chemistry and Physics at West Roxbury High School while enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston . In 1912, she received her master's degree from Smith, and two years later earned her PhD from the University of Chicago.
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Harriet George Barclay
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Harriet George Barclay was an American botanist, plant ecologist, nature conservationist, and artist. Biography Barclay was a professor at the University of Tulsa. She later became Chair of the Botany Department in 1953.
Go to Profile#3553
Evelyn Butler Tilden
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Evelyn Butler Tilden was an American microbiologist who researched carbohydrates and bacteria in saliva at National Institutes of Health and Northwestern University Dental School. She later served as head of laboratories at Brookfield Zoo.
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Winifred B. Chase
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Ethel Winifred Bennett Chase was an American botanist, a professor of botany and the dean of women at what is now Wayne State University. Chase was a member of a South Pacific botanical expedition led by Josephine E. Tilden in 1909–1910 and collected scientifically significant botanical specimens during that expedition. She was an active member of both Delta Delta Delta and the P.E.O Sisterhood and served in various administrative positions with both organisations.
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Jennie L. S. Simpson
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Jennie Laura Symons Simpson was a Canadian-American botanist and geneticist. Between 1929 and 1962, she was the professor of botany at Hunter College. Most of her research activities were focused on marine algae.
Go to Profile#3556
Kathryn Ferguson Fink
1917 - 1989 (72 years)
Kathryn Ferguson Fink was an American biochemist known for her work in nuclear medicine, particularly in the use of radiolabeling to study metabolism. Fink spent most of her career at the University of California, Los Angeles, often collaborating with her fellow biochemist husband Robert Morgan Fink, and was the first Ph.D. to become a Professor of Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine. She died of cancer in 1989.
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Cora Jipson Beckwith
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Cora Jipson Beckwith was an American zoologist who was a researcher and professor at Vassar College in New York. Life Beckwith was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan to William Griswold Beckwith and Maria A. Jipson.
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Florence Peebles
1874 - 1956 (82 years)
Florence Peebles was an American embryologist known for her research in animal regeneration and tissue formation. Born in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, to parents Elizabeth Southgate and Thomas Chalmers Peebles, she was educated in Baltimore, attending the Girls' Latin School and earning a B.A. from the Woman's College of Baltimore in 1895. She then attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, earning a PhD in 1900. She taught biology for thirty-three years, including at Bryn Mawr College, Goucher College, Tulane University, and California Christian College
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Eileen McCracken
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Eileen May McCracken was an Irish botanist, geographer and historian of botany. She also wrote on the history of Irish Gardens. Life Born 16 February 1920 in Lisburn, Ireland, the daughter of Colin and Bessie Webb, McCracken was educated at the Friends' School Lisburn and the Queens' University, Belfast, where she gained her BSc, M.Sc and PhD .
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Karin Stephen
1889 - 1953 (64 years)
Karin Stephen was a British psychoanalyst and psychologist. Early life and education Karin Stephen was born Catherine Elizabeth Costelloe. Her mother, Mary Costelloe had been a Philadelphia Quaker, and her father, Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe a Northern Irish convert to Roman Catholicism. The relationship between her parents was difficult, and her mother left her husband when Karin and her sister Rachel were very young. Her father died in 1899 when she was ten years old, so the sisters were then looked after by their grandmother. While at boarding school she won a scholarship for Newnh...
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Madeleine Fritz
1896 - 1990 (94 years)
Madeleine Alberta Fritz was a Canadian palaeontologist. She was a professor at the University of Toronto, where she taught vertebrate studies in the department of Geology. Fritz's writing on the fossil Bryozoa along with her research on the stratigraphy of Toronto and the surrounding areas were major contributions to the geological field.
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Muriel Gardiner
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Muriel Gardiner Buttinger was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Early life and career Gardiner was born on November 23, 1901, in Chicago, the daughter of Edward Morris, president of the Morris & Company meat-packing business, and Helen Morris, a member of the family which owned Swift & Company, another meat-packing firm . Similarly to other writers of the Lost Generation, Gardiner was born into a family of wealth and privilege.
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Priscilla Hussey
1894 - 1946 (52 years)
Dr. Edith Priscilla Butler Hussey was an American entomologist and biology professor who wrote numerous scientific articles and poems featured in many different magazines. She was a faculty member at the Northwestern State College of Louisiana for 17 years.
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Caroline Black
1887 - 1930 (43 years)
Caroline Black was an American botanist. Educated at Indiana University, she later taught at the University of New Hampshire and became the first chairperson of the Connecticut College botany department. Black was a founding member of the New London Garden Club. Following her death in 1930, the Connecticut College Board of Trustees named the Caroline Black Garden in her honor.
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Nora Miller
1898 - 1994 (96 years)
Agnes Eleanora Miller FRSE was a Scottish zoologist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life She was born in Dunipace in central Scotland on 7 September 1898, the eldest daughter of William Douglas Miller and his wife Agnes Cameron Adam, a singer and pianist who studied under Sir Hubert Parry. In 1906, the family moved to 57 Kirklee Road in Glasgow.
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Natalya Osadcha-Yanata
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Natalya Tikhonovna Osadcha-Yanata was a Ukrainian botanist and folklorist noted for studying the medicinal plants of Ukraine and publishing some of her works in English. She was married to Ukrainian botanist Alexander Yanata.
Go to Profile#3567
Martha Bunting
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Martha Bunting was an American biologist and teacher. Biography Bunting became the first president of the Beta Alpha chapter of the national Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at the University of Pennsylvania, the first sorority at the university in March 1890.
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Elaine Diacumakos
1930 - 1984 (54 years)
Elaine Diacumakos was an American cell biologist and head of the cytobiology laboratory at Rockefeller University. She developed the first techniques for removing and inserting material into and from cells.
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Hilda Rosene Lund
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Hilda Florence Rosene Lund was an American plant physiologist. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939 for her work on measuring water absorption by roots. Early life and education Hilda Florence Rosene was born in 1897 in Chicago, Illinois. She moved with her family to Washington State in 1900, and grew up on a dairy farm in the Snoqualmie Valley. She graduated from Lincoln High School in Seattle, before earning a teacher's diploma at Western Washington College of Education in 1917. She pursued an interest in marine science through an undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in 1922, and earned a master's degree there as well in 1924.
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Lūcija Jēruma-Krastiņa
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Lūcija Jēruma-Krastiņa was a Latvian anatomist and anthropologist, and one of the first women to be awarded a doctorate from a Latvian university. Biography Lūcija Jēruma-Krastiņa was born Lūcija Krastiņa on 12 November 1899 Cēsis. In 1925 she graduated from the University of Latvia Faculty of Medicine. She worked as an assistant to Jēkabs Prīmanis. From 1925 to 1944, she lectured in the University Department of Anatomy. Her theories on the race of the Latvians was used to create a particularly racial determination of the Latvian "race" from the 1930s onwards.
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Ada Mary à Beckett
1872 - 1948 (76 years)
Ada Mary à Beckett MSc , née Lambert, was an Australian biologist, academic and leader of the kindergarten movement in Australia. She was the first woman appointed lecturer at Melbourne University.
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Margaret Anderson
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Margaret Dampier Anderson was a British biochemist and scientific indexer. She published four scientific articles in the 1920s before marrying in 1927 and began indexing books beginning in 1960. Life Margaret Whetham was born on 21 April 1900, the daughter of William Cecil Dampier Whetham, a Cambridge-educated scientist and agricultural academic, and his wife Catherine Durning Holt, a daughter of Liverpool merchant Robert Durning Holt who had also pursued an education at Cambridge. One of her many great aunts was social reformer Beatrice Webb. She had one brother and four sisters, including Edith Holt Whetham.
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Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes was an American librarian, mathematician, and botanist who became the first woman to become state librarian of Indiana and the first woman on the faculty of Purdue University.
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Ernestine Hogan Basham Thurman
1920 - 1987 (67 years)
Ernestine Hogan Basham Thurman was an American entomologist and researcher, focusing on mosquitoes and vector control. In 1951 she was the first woman sent by the United States to Thailand to establish a malaria control program.
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Harriette Cushman
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Harriette Eliza Cushman was the first female Extension Service poultry specialist in the United States, a lifelong supporter of the arts, an environmental advocate, and an honorary member of the Blackfoot tribe.
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Ethel Katherine Crum
1886 - 1943 (57 years)
Ethel Katherine Crum was an American botanist, noted for collecting and studying California flora, as well as serving as assistant curator of the University of California Herbarium. She discovered and formally described at least 13 species and varieties of plants.
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Lucy Mabel Hall-Brown
1843 - 1907 (64 years)
Lucy M. Hall-Brown was an American physician and writer. She was a general practitioner and a physician at the Sherborn Reformatory for Women, now the Massachusetts Correctional Instituion – Framingham.
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Constance Margaret Eardley
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Constance Margaret Eardley was an Australian systematic botanist, lecturer and curator. She was the first woman appointed to the Council of the Royal Society of South Australia. Early life and education Constance Margaret Eardley was born in Fullarton, South Australia on 6 September 1910. Her mother was an historian and her father, Frederick William Eardley , was an accountant who served as registrar at the University of Adelaide. She completed her secondary education at Walford Anglican School for Girls, receiving honours in the leaving certificate. She was later president of its alumni asso...
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Flora Murray
1896 - 1968 (72 years)
Flora Buchan Murray was a New Zealand botanist, and was the second woman appointed as permanent staff at Canterbury University College. Early life and education Flora Buchan Murray was born in New Zealand on 1 August 1896 to parents the Reverend Charles and Grace Jane Murray. She grew up in Carterton, near Wellington, and was educated at Christchurch Girls' High School. She enrolled at Canterbury University College in 1915, and was the winner of the prize in zoology for 1916–1917. Murray graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1920, and followed this with an MA with first class Honours in Botany in 1921.
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Kono Yasui
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Kono Yasui was a Japanese biologist and cytologist. In 1927, she became the first Japanese woman to receive a doctoral degree in science. She received a Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon and was awarded as an Order of the Precious Crown Third Class for her academic accomplishments and leadership in women’s education in Japan.
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Eugénie Henderson
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Eugénie Jane Andrina Henderson was a British linguist and academic, specialising in phonetics. From 1964 to 1982, she was Professor of Phonetics at the University of London. She served as Chair of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain from 1977 to 1980, and President of the Philological Society from 1984 to 1988.
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Irene Baker
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Irene Baker was an American botanist who collaborated with her husband Herbert G. Baker to research pollination biology, the composition of nectar and study its ecological, evolutionary and taxonomic qualities.
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Nansie S. Sharpless
1932 - 1987 (55 years)
Nansie S. Sharpless was an American biochemist. She was an associate professor of psychiatry and neurology and Chief of the Clinical Neuropsychopharmacology Laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Deaf from the age of fourteen, Sharpless encouraged deaf people to consider careers in scientific research. She also served as the president of the Foundation for Science and the Handicapped.
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Margaret Altmann
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Margaret Altmann was a German-American biologist focusing on animal husbandry and psychobiology. She was one of the first women to work in the psychobiology, ethology and animal husbandry fields, with a focus on livestock.
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Roger Arliner Young
1889 - 1964 (75 years)
Roger Arliner Young was an American scientist of zoology, biology, and marine biology. She was the first African American woman to receive a doctorate degree in zoology. Early years Born in Clifton Forge, Virginia in 1899, Young soon moved with her family to Burgettstown, Pennsylvania where she graduated from Burgettstown High School. Her father labored as a coal miner, and her mother initially worked as a housekeeper before disability left her unable to work. The family was poor and most of the time resources were expended in the care of her disabled mother.
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Constance Endicott Hartt
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Constance Endicott Hartt was a U.S. botanist notable for her research on sugarcane. She was born in Passaic, New Jersey. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1922. She taught at St. Lawrence University and Connecticut College. She also worked as a botanist for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association. Hartt died in Hawaii in 1984.
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Emma Lucy Braun
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
E. Lucy Braun was a prominent botanist, ecologist, and expert on the forests of the eastern United States who was a professor of the University of Cincinnati. She was the first woman to be elected President of the Ecological Society of America, in 1950. She was an environmentalist before the term was popularized, and a pioneering woman in her field, winning many awards for her work.
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Pearl Kendrick
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Pearl Louella Kendrick was an American bacteriologist known for co-developing the first successful whooping cough vaccine alongside fellow Michigan Department of Public Health scientist Grace Eldering and chemist Loney Gordon in the 1930s. In the decades after the initial pertussis vaccine rollout, Kendrick contributed to the promotion of international vaccine standards in Latin America and the Soviet Union. Kendrick and her colleagues also developed a 3-in-1 shot for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus called the DTP vaccine which was initially released in 1948.
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Eleanor Carothers
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Estrella Eleanor Carothers , known primarily as Eleanor Carothers, was an American zoologist, geneticist, and cytologist known for her work with grasshoppers. She discovered important physical evidence for the concept of independent assortment, vital to modern understanding of genetics.
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Julie Lockwood
1900 - Present (126 years)
Julie L. Lockwood is an American ecologist who is a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources at Rutgers University. She is the Director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. Her research investigates how invasive species impact natural ecosystems. In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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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 .
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Louise Pearce
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Louise Pearce was an American pathologist at the Rockefeller Institute who helped develop a treatment for African sleeping sickness . Sleeping sickness was a fatal epidemic which had devastated areas of Africa, killing two-thirds of the population of the Uganda protectorate between 1900 and 1906 alone. With chemists Walter Abraham Jacobs and Michael Heidelberger and pathologist Wade Hampton Brown, Pearce worked to develop and test arsenic-based drugs for its treatment. In 1920, Louise Pearce traveled to the Belgian Congo where she designed and carried out a drug testing protocol for human trials to establish tryparsamide's safety, effectiveness, and optimum dosage.
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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.
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Charlotte Auerbach
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Charlotte "Lotte" Auerbach FRS FRSE was a German geneticist who contributed to founding the science of mutagenesis. She became well known after 1942 when she discovered with A. J. Clark and J. M. Robson that mustard gas could cause mutations in fruit flies. She wrote 91 scientific papers, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Royal Society of London.
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LaDema Langdon
1893 - 1977 (84 years)
LaDema Mary Langdon was an American botanist known for her work on floral anatomy, taxonomy, embryology, and morphology of Juglandaceae, Fagaceae, Cycas, and Dioon spinulosum. She was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a professor at Baltimore Junior College and Goucher College. She earned her bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and her graduate degrees from the University of Chicago.
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Honor Fell
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Dame Honor Bridget Fell, DBE, FRS was a British scientist and zoologist. Her contributions to science included the development of experimental methods in organ culture, tissue culture, and cell biology.
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Irene Manton
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Irene Manton, FRS FLS was a British botanist who was Professor of Botany at the University of Leeds. She was noted for study of ferns and algae. Biography Irene Manton was the daughter of dental surgeon, George Manton and embroideress and designer, and descendant of French aristocracy, Milana Manton . Her first name was originally pronounced and spelled in the French manner; but at 18 she dropped this and opted for "Irene". Her sister was the entomologist Sidnie Manton FRS. She was educated at the Froebel Demonstration School and St. Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith. While still in school s...
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Katherine Esau
1898 - 1997 (99 years)
Katherine Esau was a pioneering German-American botanist who studied plant anatomy and the effects of viruses. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants are key texts. In 1989, Esau received the National Medal of Science "In recognition of her distinguished service to the American community of plant biologists, and for the excellence of her pioneering research, both basic and applied, on plant structure and development, which has spanned more than six decades; for her superlative performance as an educator, in the classroom and through her books; for the encouragement and inspira...
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Madeleine van Oppen
Madeleine van Oppen is a Dutch ecological geneticist researching at the University of Melbourne. She has been an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow since 2018. She obtained her MsC in 1990 and completed her PhD cum laude on the molecular biogeography of seaweeds at the University of Groningen in 1995.
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Lorande Loss Woodruff
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
Lorande Loss Woodruff was an American biologist, notable for his exhaustive studies of unicelluar eukaryotes, especially ciliates; and for his long tenure as a trustee of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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