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,
#3651
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.
Go to Profile#3658
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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Rachel Carson
1907 - 1964 (57 years)
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
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Gerty Cori
1896 - 1957 (61 years)
Gerty Theresa Cori was an Austrian-American biochemist who in 1947 was the third woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, and the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for her role in the "discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen".
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Mary Anning
1799 - 1847 (48 years)
Mary Anning was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist who became known around the world for the discoveries she made in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in the county of Dorset in Southwest England. Anning's findings contributed to changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.
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A. Elizabeth Adams
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Amy Elizabeth Adams was an American zoologist and professor at Mount Holyoke College. Early life and education Born in the Delaware section of Knowlton Township, New Jersey, Adams studied biology at Mount Holyoke, earning her bachelor's degree in 1914. She earned a master's degree from Columbia University in 1918 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1923. The title of her thesis, first printed in 1924 in the Journal of Experimental Zoology, was 'An experimental study of the development of the mouth in the amphibian embryo.' Adams also studied for a year from 1930 to 1931 at the University of E...
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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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Rosa Smith Eigenmann
1858 - 1947 (89 years)
Rosa Smith Eigenmann was an American ichthyologist , as well as a writer, editor, former curator at the California Academy of Sciences, and the first librarian of the San Diego Society of Natural History. She "is considered the first woman ichthyologist in the United States." Eigenmann was also the first woman to become president of Indiana University's chapter of Sigma Xi, an honorary science society. She authored twelve published papers of her own between 1880 and 1893, and collaborated with her husband, Carl H. Eigenmann, as "Eigenmann & Eigenmann" on twenty-five additional works between 1888 and 1893.
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Muriel Robertson
1883 - 1973 (90 years)
Muriel Robertson , was a Scottish protozoologist and bacteriologist at the Lister Institute, London from 1915 to 1961. She made key discoveries of the life cycle of trypanosomess. She was one of the founding members of the Society for Microbiology , along with Alexander Fleming and Marjory Stephenson.
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Clara H. Hasse
1880 - 1926 (46 years)
Clara Henriette Hasse was an American botanist whose research focused on plant pathology. She is known for identifying the cause of citrus canker, which was threatening crops in the Deep South. Biography Hasse attended the University of Michigan. While at U of M, she was appointed an assistant in botany in 1902. Hasse was a founding member of the Women's Research Club at U of M as women were not allowed in the Research Club at the time. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1903 with a PhB, she went to Washington, D.C., to take up an appointment as assistant horticulturist and botanist in the Bureau of Plant Industry at the U.S.
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Johanna Westerdijk
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Johanna Westerdijk was a Dutch plant pathologist and the first female professor in the Netherlands. Early life Johanna Westerdijk, called "Hans" by friends, was born on 4 January 1883 in Nieuwer-Amstel, a small village south of Amsterdam, and died on 15 November 1961 at 78 years old in Baarn, Netherlands.
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Carrie Derick
1862 - 1941 (79 years)
Carrie Matilda Derick was a Canadian botanist and geneticist, the first female professor in a Canadian university, and the founder of McGill University's genetics department. Early life and education Born in the Eastern Townships in Clarenceville, Canada East in 1862, Derick was educated at the Clarenceville Academy . She began teaching by the age of fifteen. Derick later received teacher training at the McGill Normal School, graduating in 1881 as a Prince of Wales Gold Medal winner. She then went on to become a school teacher in Clarenceville and Montreal, and later serving as a principal ...
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Julia Bell
1879 - 1979 (100 years)
Julia Bell was a pioneering English human geneticist. Biography She attended Girton College in Cambridge and took the Mathematical Tripos exam in 1901. But because women could not officially receive degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, she was awarded a master's degree at Trinity College, Dublin for her work investigating solar parallax at Cambridge Observatory. In 1908, she moved to University College London and obtained a position there as an assistant in statistics.
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Ruth F. Allen
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Ruth Florence Allen was an American botanist and plant pathologist and the first woman to earn her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Wisconsin. Her doctorate research focused on the reproduction and cell biology of ferns, particularly the phenomenon of apogamy . Later in her career, Allen shifted her focus to plant pathology. Her major contribution to the field of mycology was furthering the understanding of rust fungi, a group of economically important plant pathogens. Allen completed many studies on Puccinia graminis, once considered a catastrophically damaging disease-causing agent i...
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Wilhelmine Key
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Wilhelmine "Minnie" Marie Enteman Key was an American geneticist. She was the first woman to gain a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago, where she studied coloration in paper wasps. She contributed to the study of eugenics and was an influential teacher to Sewall Wright.
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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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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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