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,
#3651
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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Caroline Thomas Rumbold
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Caroline Thomas Rumbold was an American botanist. She specialized in forest pathology. Her researches focused on “fungus diseases of trees and blue stain of wood.” Biography Born on July 22, 1877, in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, Caroline Thomas Rumbold was the daughter of Thomas Frasier Rumbold and Charlotte E. Ledengerber. In 1901 she graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts. She got both the master's degree and the doctorate from the Washington University in St. Louis.
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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.
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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.
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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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Mary Pocock
1886 - 1977 (91 years)
Mary Agard Pocock was a South African phycologist. Biography Born in Rondebosch in 1886 to William Pocock and Elizabeth Dacomb, Mary Pocock attended Bedford High School and Cheltenham Ladies' College. Pocock then attended the University of London where she studied botany, receiving her degree in 1908. Following her degree Pocock taught at girls schools in London and the Cape before continuing her study in 1919; completing an additional honors degree in botany at Cambridge. She was a lecturer at Rhodes University for a year in 1924, a position which she took up occasionally again during her career.
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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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Dian Fossey
1932 - 1985 (53 years)
Dian Fossey was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her murder in 1985. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Gorillas in the Mist, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name.
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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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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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Edith Marion Patch
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Edith Marion Patch was an American entomologist and writer. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, she received a degree from the University of Minnesota in 1901 and originally embarked on a career as an English teacher before receiving the opportunity to organize the entomology department at the University of Maine. She became the head of the entomology department in 1904, and, despite misgivings from several male colleagues about having a female department head, she remained in this post until her retirement in 1937. Edith Patch is recognized as the first truly successful professional woman ento...
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Dorothy Day
1896 - Present (130 years)
Dorothy Day was an American plant physiologist. Education and career Dorothy Day received an A.B. degree from Wellesley College in 1919; an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin in 1925; and her Ph.D. in plant physiology from that institution in 1927. She also attended the University of Chicago in 1929 and Cornell University in 1942–1943.
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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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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 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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Elizabeth Marianne Blackwell
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Elizabeth "Elsie" Marianne Blackwell was an English botanist and mycologist, known as an expert on Phytophthora. She was the president of the British Mycological Society for a one-year term from 1942 to 1943.
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Augusta Vera Duthie
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Augusta Vera Duthie was a South African botanist who studied the plants of the Western Cape and was a popular teacher who lectured on cryptogamic botany. She was the first university lecturer in botany who was entirely educated in South Africa.
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Erna Walter
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Erna Walter was a German botanist, ecologist, botanical collector and bryologist. Life and work The daughter of botanist Heinrich Schenck, Erna studied botany, physics and chemistry in Darmstadt and Heidelberg. She received her doctorate in 1918 under the direction of botanist Georg Albrecht Klebs at the University of Heidelberg. Her dissertation was titled: Bacteriocine von Clostridium perfringens. Walter then worked as a scientific assistant at the Botanical Institute of the University of Heidelberg with Ludwig Jost and as an intern at the Biological Reich Institute in Berlin-Dahlem. She wa...
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Ethel Irene McLennan
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Ethel Irene McLennan was an Australian botanist, mycologist and educator. Personal life and early career The daughter of George McLennan and Eleanor Tucker, she was born in Williamstown, Victoria and was educated at the Tintern Church of England Girls' Grammar School in Hawthorn. In 1914, she received a BSc from the University of Melbourne. From 1915 to 1931, she was a demonstrator and botany lecturer at the university. Her main areas of interest were mycology and plant-fungal relationships. However, she was also one of the illustrators of The Flora of the Northern Territories .
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Winifred Smith
1858 - 1925 (67 years)
Winifred Smith was an English botanist and educationist. She became a lecturer in the botany department at University College, London and took a leading role in supporting women students. First forty years She was born in Mortlake, Surrey on 5 November 1858 to Fanny and James Smith, who owned and ran a building business. Some of Smith's education was at Queen's College, London, a pioneering school for girls aged from 12 to 20. She then "devoted" herself to teaching until she began studying at University College in 1899. In the late 1870s her family experienced changes: her father went bankrup...
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Maria Petraccini
1759 - 1791 (32 years)
Maria Magdalena Petraccini Ferretti was an Italian anatomist, physician, professor of anatomy. She was born in Florence, Tuscany, 1759 and died in Bagnacavallo, Ravenna, 1791. Biography and personal life Pettracini was born in a merchant family in Tuscany. She married Italian physician and anatomy professor Francesco Ferretti. She became interested in surgery thanks to him, who was the chief at the Bagnacavallo hospital. Subsequently, Petraccini was tutored in surgery by her spouse, who taught her by operating on corpses. Her technique became so precise that she was envied even by those above her.
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Ann Stone Minot
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
Ann Stone Minot was an American biochemist and physiologist. She was born in Woodsville, New Hampshire, the oldest of six children born to Jonas Minot and Sybil Buck. For their early education, Minot and her siblings attended the Bath Village School, a small three-room schoolhouse. Starting in 1911, Minot matriculated to Smith College with the help of a partial scholarship, where she majored in chemistry and English. She graduated in 1915 with an A.B. degree.
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Sarah Martha Baker
1887 - 1917 (30 years)
Sarah Martha Baker D.Sc. F.L.S. was an English botanist and ecologist who is remembered for her studies of brown seaweeds and zonation patterns on the seashore. Early life Born in London on 4 June 1887, she was the daughter of Martha Braithwaite Baker and George Samuel Baker and grew up in a Quaker family with two younger brothers, George and Bevan. As well as their main London home the family had a country house at Mersea Island where Baker first took an interest in seaweed. She is said to have been interested in plants and flowers from an early age. Another interest was art and she studied briefly at the Slade School of Art before moving into science.
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Margaret Sylvia Gilliland
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Margaret Sylvia Gilliland was an Australian biochemist, academic and anti-nuclear campaiger. The daughter of Robert Dugald Bertie and Kathleen Crommelin, she was born Margaret Sylvia Bertie in Grenfell, New South Wales; her uncle Charles Henry Bertie was a librarian and historian. She received a BSc in biochemistry from the University of Melbourne. In 1942, she married Alexander Forbes Gilliland ; the couple had three children. Gilliland later worked as a biochemistry demonstrator at the University of Queensland where she was also an active member of the Queensland Association of University Women.
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Jean Broadhurst
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
Jean Alice Broadhurst was an American educator, botanist and bacteriologist, known for her work in detecting the measles virus. Career Broadhurst graduated from New Jersey State Normal School in 1892; thereafter joining the school's faculty. She studied at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City; taught in the department of botany and zoology at Barnard College; and in 1906 joined the Teachers College, Columbia University faculty. Broadhurst earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1914, and retired as emerita professor at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1939.
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Harriet Richardson
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Harriet Richardson Searle was an American carcinologist. She was known as the first lady of isopods and was one of the first female carcinologists, with only Mary Jane Rathbun before her. Biography Richardson was born on May 9, 1874, in Washington, D.C., to Charles and Charlotte Ann Richardson. She attended the Friends School and Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington before attending Vassar College - where she became interested in biology - from which she graduated in 1896 with a BA, and again with a master's degree in zoology in 1901.
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Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley was an English gardening author and instructor. Her Glynde College for Lady Gardeners in East Sussex had the patronage of famous gardening names such as Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Willmott, and William Robinson.
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Winona Hazel Welch
1896 - 1990 (94 years)
Winona Hazel Welch was an American bryologist. As a professor at DePauw University, she became the first female head of the botany and bacteriology department at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.
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Marian Irwin Osterhout
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Marian Irwin Osterhout , was an American plant physiologist born in Japan. She was the first woman to receive a National Research Council fellowship. Early life and education Marian Irwin was born in Tokyo, the daughter of Iki Takechi Irwin and Robert Walker Irwin . Her mother was a Japanese noblewoman, daughter of a samurai; her father was an American diplomat, the son of William W. Irwin and a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin. Her older sister Bella Irwin founded a school in Tokyo. Their aunt, Agnes Irwin, was also an educator, the first dean of Radcliffe College.
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Lois Clark
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Lois Clark was an American botanist, bryologist, and professor who studied plants of the Northwestern United States, particularly the genus Frullania. She taught at the University of Idaho and the University of Washington.
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Bertha Stoneman
1866 - 1943 (77 years)
Bertha Stoneman was an American-born South African botanist. She was president of Huguenot College from 1921 to 1933, and founder of the South African Association of University Women. Early life and education Bertha Stoneman was born on a farm near Jamestown, New York, the daughter of Byron Stoneman and Mary Jane Markaham Stoneman. Her aunt, Kate Stoneman, was the first woman admitted to the New York State bar, and her uncle George Stoneman was a general in the American Civil War and later governor of California. Bertha Stoneman completed undergraduate and doctoral studies in botany at Cornell University in 1894 and 1896, respectively.
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Dorothy G. Downie
1894 - 1960 (66 years)
Dorothy G. Downie was a Scottish botanist and forester. She is known for her research on the fungal symbionts and nutritional requirements of orchids. Biography Dorothy G. Downie graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1917 with a B.S. in science and in 1919 with a B.S. in forestry. She was the first woman to receive a degree in forestry from the University of Edinburgh. From 1919 to 1920 she studied at Moray House Training College, where she qualified in professional training for teachers. From 1920 to 1925 she worked at the University of Aberdeen as an assistant to William Grant Cra...
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Nina Floy Bracelin
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Nina Floy Bracelin was a botanist, plant collector, and scientific illustrator. A fuchsia, Fuchsia bracelinae, is named after her. A willow, Salix lesiolepis bracelinae, is named after her. She was given a lifetime membership to the California Academy of Sciences.
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Grace Medes
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Grace Medes was an American biochemist, who discovered tyrosinosis—a metabolic disorder today known as tyrosinemia—and studied fatty acid metabolism. She was awarded the Garvan-Olin Medal in 1955 for her work.
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Lydia Shattuck
1822 - 1889 (67 years)
Lydia White Shattuck was an American botanist, naturalist, chemist, and professor at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary . Early life and education Shattuck was born in 1822 in East Landoff , New Hampshire to first cousins Betsey Fletcher and Timothy Shattuck, and she was the only one of their first five children to survive past infancy. When she was a young girl, her mother would take her on excursions through the woods, which inspired a love of nature, particularly wildflowers.
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Sabra Klein
Sabra Klein is an American microbiologist who is a Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research considers how sex and gender impact the immune system. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Klein investigated why men and women have different COVID-19 outcomes.
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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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Mary Beckerle
Mary C. Beckerle is an American cell biologist who studies cancer at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah School of Medicine. At Huntsman Cancer Institute, she serves as the CEO and also as Associate Vice President for Cancer Affairs at the University of Utah. Beckerle's research helped to define a novel molecular pathway for cell motility, and more recently, she has begun research into Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric bone cancer. Beckerle's lab made a ground breaking discovery in regards to Ewing's Sarcoma in relation to the EWS/FLI protein. Her lab discovered EWS/FLI to disru...
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