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,
#3601
Lillien Jane Martin
1851 - 1943 (92 years)
Lillien Jane Martin was an American psychologist. She published over twelve books. Martin experienced ageism and sexism as an early woman in psychology. Early life and education Lillien Jane Martin was born on July 7, 1851, at Olean, New York. At the age of four, she entered the nearby Olean Academy. At the age of sixteen, her talents were recognized such that she became a teacher at a girls' school in Wisconsin. By the age of 26, in 1876, she had earned enough money to return to her native New York where she enrolled at Vassar College at Poughkeepsie, New York.
Go to Profile#3602
Lilias Armstrong
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
Lilias Eveline Armstrong was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as well as the phonetics and tone of Somali and Kikuyu. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for 50 years. Armstrong also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu.
Go to Profile#3603
Winifred Josephine Robinson
1867 - 1962 (95 years)
Winifred Josephine Robinson was an American botanist, educator, and educational administrator. As a botanist, she studied ferns and wrote several papers and books. She was the first dean of the Women's College of the University of Delaware, which was founded in 1914.
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Ida Kraus Ragins
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Ida Kraus Ragins, née Kraus , was a Russian Empire-born American biochemist. Life and work Ida Kraus Ragins was born in the Russian Empire and moved to the United States before 1915. That year she started work as an assistant in quantitative analysis in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Chicago, possibly as a student job, as she received her B.A. in 1918 and her M.S. from the university the following year. Kraus Ragins taught for a year at the Oklahoma College for Women, before returning to Chicago to work on her Ph.D. which she received in 1924. She then worked as an instructor...
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Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock
1851 - 1936 (85 years)
Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock was one of only 13 American women to receive their doctorates in chemistry during the 19th-century, and was the first woman to receive a doctorate in Philosophy of Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Sarah P. Monks
1846 - 1926 (80 years)
Sarah Preston Monks was an American naturalist, educator, scientific illustrator, and poet, based for much of her career in San Pedro, California. Monks was the first zoology instructor at Los Angeles State Normal School, a precursor to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught for over 20 years, and published on diverse topics including reptiles, amphibians, spiders, and marine biology.
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Kathleen Bever Blackburn
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Kathleen Bever Blackburn, was a British botanist best remembered for the 1923 discovery that plant cells have sex chromosomes. Her principal contributions were in plant cytology and genetics. She was also a pioneer of pollen analysis. She taught botany at Armstrong College, Durham University from 1918 to 1957.
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Mathilde Lange
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Mathilde Margarethe Lange was an American biologist known for her research in experimental embryology. She was born in New York City and her father was a physician and surgeon. She attended the University of Zurich and earned her Ph.D. in 1920. She was employed by the United States Department of Agriculture for the first year following her Ph.D. as a researcher. Lange then moved to Wheaton College, Massachusetts as a professor of zoology, where she remained until her retirement in 1950. Her professional memberships included the New York Academy of Growth and the Genetic Association.
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Carrie Adeline Barbour
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Carrie Adeline Barbour was an American paleontologist and educator. As an assistant curator of paleontology at the University of Nebraska State Museum and an Assistant Professor of Paleontology, Barbour was among the earliest women paleontologists in the United States.
Go to Profile#3610
Julia Warner Snow
1863 - 1927 (64 years)
Julia Warner Snow was an American botanist and was known in the scientific community for her work as a systematic phycologist. Snow was born in La Salle, Illinois, the third child of Norman G. Snow and Charlotte D. . At the age of sixteen she left La Salle to enter Hungerford Collegiate Institute, Adams, New York. After graduating in 1880, she returned home to live with her parents, then in 1884 matriculated to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. While an undergraduate, she joined the Kappa Alpha Theta fraternity. When the Sigma Xi honor society was formed at Cornell in 1886, Julia joined along with fellow Theta Anna Botsford Comstock.
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Ida Shepard Oldroyd
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Ida Shepard Oldroyd was an American conchologist and Curator of Geology at Stanford University for over 20 years, who curated what was for a time the second largest collection of mollusk shells in the world. Oldroyd and her husband, Tom Shaw Oldroyd, amassed one of the largest private shell collections in California. Ida was recognized as an active and early pioneer of conchology in the western United States. She was a charter member of the American Malacological Union, of which she served as vice-president in 1934 and as honorary president from 1935 to 1940.
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Helen Riaboff Whiteley
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
Helen Riaboff Whiteley was a microbiologist who spent most of her research career at the University of Washington. Early life and education Whiteley was born in 1921 to Russian parents in Harbin, China. The family immigrated to the United States in 1924, first settling in Washington and later moving to California. Whiteley studied microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her B.S. in 1941. She then earned a master's degree from the University of Texas, Galveston and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, where her husband Arthur Whiteley was at the time an assistant professor of zoology.
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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#3615
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.
Go to Profile#3624
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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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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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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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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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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Abby Howe Turner
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Abby Howe Turner was a noted professor of physiology and zoology who founded the department of physiology at Mount Holyoke College. She specialized in colloid osmotic pressure and circulatory reactions to gravity.
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Elizabeth B. Bryant
1875 - 1953 (78 years)
Elizabeth Bangs Bryant was an American arachnologist. She worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was a close acquaintance of James Henry Emerton. She is best known for her studies of the spiders of New England and the Caribbean.
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Janaki Ammal
1897 - 1984 (87 years)
Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal was an Indian botanist who worked on plant breeding, cytogenetics and phytogeography. Her most notable work involved studies on sugarcane and the eggplant . She also worked on the cytogenetics of a range of plants and co-authored the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants with C.D. Darlington. She took an interest in ethnobotany and plants of medicinal and economic value from the rain forests of Kerala, India. She was awarded Padma Shri by the then prime minister of India in 1977.
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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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Margaret Mary Smith
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Margaret Mary Smith was born on 26 September 1916 in Indwe, Cape Province, South Africa, a small village on the border of the Transkei. She was an ichthyologist, accomplished fish illustrator, and an academic.
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Mabel Rayner
1890 - 1948 (58 years)
Mabel Mary Cheveley Rayner was an English botanist specialising in mycology. She published books and articles on plant physiology and was one of the first researchers to propose that mycorrhizal interactions could both help and harm plants.
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Helen Lee Gruehl
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Helen Lee Gruehl Aikman was an American immunologist. Early life and education Gruehl was born in Passaic, New Jersey, the daughter of Edward Charles Gruehl and Susan Ramsay Mason Gruehl. Her father was manager of a rubber factory; her mother was a teacher and clubwoman. Gruehl graduated from Passaic High School in 1920, and from Mount Holyoke College in 1924. Her major was chemistry, and her minor was in mathematics; she was also known as a dancer during her college years.
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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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Ruth Bleier
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
Ruth Harriet Bleier was an American neurophysiologist who is also one of the first feminist scholars to explore how gender biases have shaped biology. Her career consisted of combining her academic interests with her commitment to social justice for women and the lower-class.
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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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Marie Stopes
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse.
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Harriet Robinson
Harriet Latham Robinson is an American vaccine researcher who is founder and Chief Scientific Officer Emeritus at GeoVax. She is the former Chief of Microbiology and Immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Microbiology at Emory University. Her research considered HIV vaccine development. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Liliana Lubińska
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Liliana Lubińska was a Polish neuroscientist known for her research on the peripheral nervous system and her discovery of bidirectional axoplasmic transport. She and her husband Jerzy Konorski founded the Department of Neurophysiology at the Nencki Institution in 1946
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Nancy Sullivan
Nancy Jean Sullivan is an American cell biologist researching filovirus immunology and vaccine development. She is a senior investigator and chief of the biodefense research section at the Vaccine Research Center. Her team discovered the monoclonal antibody, mAb114.
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Myra Keen
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Angeline Myra Keen was an American malacologist and invertebrate paleontologist. She was an expert on the evolution of marine mollusks. With a PhD in psychology. Keen went from being a volunteer, identifying shells at Stanford, and having no formal training in biology or geology, to being one of the world's foremost malacologists. She was called the "First Lady of Malacology".
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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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Wanda Kirkbride Farr
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Wanda K. Farr was an American botanist known for her discovery of the mechanism by which cellulose is formed in the walls of plant cells. Early life Wanda Farr was born near New Matamoras, Ohio on January 9, 1895, to parents Frederick Alonzo Kirkbride and Clara M Nikolaus. When she was four years old, her father died and she and her mother went to live with Wanda's grandparents in New Matamoras. Her great-grandfather, Dr. Samuel Richardson, was a physician who lived in the same town. He helped cultivate her interest in science, in particular in plants and growing things.
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Betty Batham
1917 - 1974 (57 years)
Elizabeth Joan Batham was a New Zealand marine biologist and university lecturer. A past president of the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Batham directed the Portobello Marine Biological Station at the University of Otago for more than 23 years.
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Ann P. Wood
Ann Patricia Wood is a retired British biochemist and bacteriologist who specialized in the ecology, taxonomy and physiology of sulfur-oxidizing chemolithoautotrophic bacteria and how methylotrophic bacteria play a role in the degradation of odour causing compounds in the human mouth, vagina and skin. The bacterial genus Annwoodia was named to honor her contributions to microbial research in 2017.
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