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,
#3701
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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Dorothea Rudnick
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Dorothea Rudnick was an American embryologist, who also made contributions as a scientific editor and translator. Early life and education Dorothea Rudnick was born in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin in 1907, and was raised in Chicago, Illinois. Her father Paul Rudnick was chief chemist for Armour Laboratories, and both of her brothers became physicists. As a student at Parker High School she won the $2500 grand prize in an essay contest sponsored by the Chicago Daily Tribune.
Go to Profile#3703
Arda Green
1899 - 1958 (59 years)
Arda Alden Green was an American biochemist who co-discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin and discovered the reaction responsible for firefly bioluminescence. She is also known for contributing to Gerty Cori and Carl Cori's elucidation of the Cori cycle and showing how pH affects hemoglobin's ability to bind and transport oxygen. She received the Garvan-Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society for her work.
Go to Profile#3704
Carlotta Maury
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Carlotta Joaquina Maury was a geologist, stratigrapher, paleontologist, and was one of the first women to work as a professional scientist in the oil and gas industry. She worked as a palaeontologist within an oil company; she was a petroleum geologist at Royal Dutch Shell. Maury focused on Tertiary mollusks. Maury initially taught in universities after attending Cornell University finishing with a PhD in 1902, although she had trouble achieving a full-time position. However, she really wanted to pursue paleontological expeditions. Even though she went on to later be successful, there were still elements of difficulty in her early career, in some ways due to her gender.
Go to Profile#3705
Adele Gerard Lewis Grant
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
Adele Gerard Lewis Grant was an American feminist, botanist, teacher, taxonomist, curator, and explorer. Career In 1903, she obtained a B.Sc. in botany from the University of California at Berkeley. She continued with her studies, gaining an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in botany from Washington State University. Before her move to South Africa, she taught at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Cornell University.
Go to Profile#3706
Frjeda Blanchard
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Frjeda Blanchard, née Cobb , was an American plant and animal geneticist, the first to demonstrate Mendelian inheritance in reptiles. Life and work Frjeda Blanchard was born on October 2, 1889, in Sydney, Australia, daughter of the plant pathologist and nematologist, Nathan Cobb. Her family returned to the United States in 1905, first living in Hawaii and then settling in Washington, D.C. Cobb's family helped him in his work and Frjeda aided her father in his laboratory. She went to Radcliffe College for three years before returning home to assist her father in his home laboratory and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a B.S.
Go to Profile#3707
Florence Annie Mockeridge
1889 - 1958 (69 years)
Florence Annie Mockeridge was a British botanist and university professor. Mockeridge was a lecturer at King's College, London, 1917-1922, and lecturer at University College Swansea 1922-1954. She was also a Linnean Society Fellow. Her research output included significant work on growth promoting substances.
Go to Profile#3708
Edith A. Roberts
1881 - 1977 (96 years)
Edith Adelaide Roberts was an American botanist studying plant physiology and a pioneer in plant ecology. She created the first ecological laboratory in the United States, promoted natural landscaping along with Elsa Rehmann, and proved that plants were the main source of vitamin A.
Go to Profile#3709
Angela Roberts
Angela Charlotte Roberts is a British neurobiologist who is a professor of physiology at the University of Cambridge. Her research considers the neural circuits that underpin cognition and emotion. She leads the Cambridge Marmoset Research Centre. She was awarded the 2020 Goldman-Rakic Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Cognitive Neuroscience.
Go to Profile#3710
Josephine Langworthy Rathbone
1899 - 1989 (90 years)
Josephine Langworthy Rathbone was an American physiologist whose research and work involved physical education and relaxation. She taught at Teachers College, Columbia University from 1930 to 1958, and was a founding member of the American College of Sports Medicine .
Go to Profile#3711
Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner was a Jewish bacteriologist and physician, known for her research on tuberculosis and public health. She was the second woman to become a Professor in Prussia. Biography Lydia Rabinowitsch was born at Kovno, Russian Empire . She was educated at the girls' gymnasium of her native city, and privately in Latin and Greek, subsequently studying natural sciences at the universities of Zurich and Bern . After graduation she went to Berlin, where Professor Robert Koch permitted her to pursue her bacteriological studies at the Institute for Infectious Diseases. She became t...
Go to Profile#3712
Hazel Branch
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Hazel Elizabeth Branch was an American entomologist. Branch was affiliated with the American Society of Zoologists and the Academy for the Advancement of Science. Branch was also the president of the Kansas Academy of Science.
Go to Profile#3713
Ruby Hirose
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Ruby Sakae Hirose was an American biochemist and bacteriologist. She did research on blood clotting and thrombin, allergies, and researched cancer using antimetabolites. Family and early life Ruby Hirose was born to Shiusaka Hirose and Tome in Kent, Washington, on August 30, 1904. She was the second child of seven children in the family, but because the first child died very young, grew up as the oldest child of six in the family. She had four sisters and one brother, and they lived in the White River area around Seattle. The second child in the family was Fumiko, two years younger than Ruby.
Go to Profile#3714
Olive Griffith Stull
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Olive Griffith Stull was an American herpetologist. Stull was born in Rochester, New York. She married Loy Davis in 1930, one year after completing her degree at the University of Michigan. She worked in the field of veterinary medicine and contributed to research in a variety of fields. Her appointments included fellowships at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and at her alma mater, where she was a student of Alexander Grant Ruthven. She published an important revision of the colubrid snake genus Pituophis, and is the author of the species Pituophis ruthveni whose name honours her professor at Michigan.
Go to Profile#3715
Gwynneth Vaughan Buchanan
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Gwynneth Vaughan Buchanan was an Australian zoologist. She is best known for her work on animal morphology, culminating in the book Elements of Animal Morphology. She was a lecturer, and then a senior lecturer, at the University of Melbourne from 1921 to 1944.
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Helen Redfield
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Helen Redfield , was an American geneticist. Redfield graduated from Rice University in 1920, followed by earning her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1921. While at Rice, she worked in the mathematics department. She joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1925 and that same year she became a National Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 1926 she married Jack Schultz, the couple had two children. Redfield retained her maiden name upon her marriage. In 1929 she worked as a teaching fellow at New York University. Ten years later she worked as a geneticist in the Kerckhoff Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
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Lottlisa Behling
1909 - 1989 (80 years)
Lottlisa Behling was a German art historian and botanist. Biography Lottlisa Behling was born on 15 July 1909 in Neustettin, Pomerania. She was a double major in art history and botany at the universities of Greifswald, Halle and Berlin. She received her doctorate degree 1937 in Berlin. Her doctoral thesis was titled Das ungegenständliche Bauornament der Gotik. Versuch einer Geschichte des Maßwerks.
Go to Profile#3718
Marion Fyfe
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Marion Liddell Fyfe was a New Zealand academic, specialising in taxonomy of planarians and other flatworms, the first woman zoology lecturer at the University of Otago, and the first woman to be elected to the Council of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
Go to Profile#3719
Margaret Blackwood
1909 - 1986 (77 years)
Dame Margaret Blackwood was an Australian botanist and geneticist. She attended the University of Melbourne and lectured there for the majority of her career, becoming deputy chancellor after her academic retirement. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1981 and was inducted posthumously into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001.
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Mignon Talbot
1869 - 1950 (81 years)
Mignon Talbot was an American paleontologist. Talbot recovered and named the only known fossils of the dinosaur Podokesaurus holyokensis, which were found near Mount Holyoke College in 1910, and published a scientific description of the specimen in 1911. In 1909 she became the first woman elected to be a member of the Paleontological Society. In the state of New York, she contributed to the Helderbergian crinoids and studied the faunas of Stafford limestone.
Go to Profile#3721
Margaret Levyns
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Margaret Rutherford Bryan Levyns was an eminent South African phytogeographer, botanist and taxonomist. Early life and education Margaret Levyns was initially educated at home by her mother and later attended Ellerslie Girls' School. She obtained a first class matriculation and was awarded two bursaries. In 1908 she enrolled at the South African College intending to study mathematics, geology and chemistry, with botany for her honours year. Prof. Harold Pearson persuaded her to take botany as a major subject. After winning two scholarships, the Queen Victoria Scholarship and the 1851 Exhibiti...
Go to Profile#3722
Mary Logan Reddick
1914 - 1966 (52 years)
Mary Logan Reddick was an American neuroembryologist who earned her PhD from Radcliffe College, Harvard University in 1944. She was a full professor, first at Morehouse College, and then at the University of Atlanta from 1953 to her death. Her doctoral dissertation was on the study of chick embryos, and she went on to do research with time-lapse microscopy in tissue cultures.
Go to Profile#3723
Edith Clements
1877 - 1971 (94 years)
Edith Gertrude Clements , also known as Edith S. Clements and Edith Schwartz Clements, was an American botanist and pioneer of botanical ecology who was the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Nebraska. She was married to botanist Frederic Clements, with whom she collaborated throughout her professional life. Together they founded the Alpine Laboratory, a research station at Pikes Peak, Colorado. Clements was also a botanical artist who illustrated her own books as well as joint publications with Frederic.
Go to Profile#3724
Eva Myrtelle Roush
1886 - 1954 (68 years)
Eva Myrtelle Roush was an American botanist noted for her study of Sidalcea and her work at the Arnold Arboretum. In 1930, she received her doctorate degree in botany from Washington University in St. Louis.
Go to Profile#3725
Myrtle E. Johnson
1881 - 1967 (86 years)
Myrtle Elizabeth Johnson was an American marine biologist, ascidiologist, and educator in California in the early 20th century. She was the first woman PhD faculty member at the San Diego State College , where she taught from 1921 to 1946, and was chair of the Biology department from 1928 to 1940. Her major work, Seashore Animals of the Pacific Coast, published in 1927, was the standard descriptive text of intertidal species until Ed Ricketts's Between Pacific Tides was published in 1939. Ricketts considered Johnson's book "the vade mecum of marine biologists of the Pacific. Indispensable."
Go to Profile#3726
Maria Dahl
1872 - 1972 (100 years)
Maria Johanna Dahl, née Grosset was a Ukrainian-born German zoologist, arachnologist, and carcinologist. Along with her husband, Friedrich Dahl, she was a co-author and editor of the zoological series Die Tierwelt Deutschlands, published between 1925 and 1968.
Go to Profile#3727
Liivia Laasimer
1918 - 1988 (70 years)
Liivia-Maria Laasimer was an Estonian botanist, geobotanist, bryologist and plant systematist. Life and work Laasimer was born in Tartu, Estonia, and in 1941 she graduated from Tartu University. From 1941 to 1947 she worked in Tartu University's Department of Plant Systematics and Geobotany at the Institute of Botany. From 1947 to 1988 she worked at the Estonian Institute of Zoology and Botany and was head of its botanical section from 1952 to 1986 and chief scientist from 1986 to 1988. There she researched geobotany and plant geography and ecology. She also prepared Estonian vegetation maps...
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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.
Go to Profile#3731
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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Jantina Tammes
1871 - 1947 (76 years)
Jantina "Tine" Tammes was a Dutch botanist and geneticist and the first professor of genetics in the Netherlands. Early life and education Tammes was born on 23 June 1871 in Groningen in the Netherlands. She was the daughter of cocoa manufacturer Beerend Tammes and Swaantje Pot. She had a sister and four brothers, and was the aunt of the international lawyer Arnold Tammes and the botanist Pieter Merkus Lambertus Tammes, namesake of the Tammes problem in mathematics.
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Astrid Cleve
1875 - 1968 (93 years)
Astrid Maria Cleve von Euler was a Swedish botanist, geologist, chemist and researcher at Uppsala University. She was the first woman in Sweden to obtain a doctoral degree of science. Life Astrid Maria Cleve was born into academic life on 22 January 1875, in Uppsala, Sweden. She was the eldest daughter of the chemist, oceanographer, geologist and professor Per Teodor Cleve and author Carolina Alma "Caralma" Öhbom . Her younger sisters were Agnes Cleve-Jonand , a visual artist and pioneer of Modernism in Sweden and Célie Brunius , a journalist. They received their early education at home from ...
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Isabel Clifton Cookson
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Isabel Clifton Cookson was an Australian botanist who specialised in palaeobotany and palynology. Early years and education Cookson was born at Hawthorn, Victoria, and attended the Methodist Ladies' College at Kew where she gained honours in anatomy, physiology and botany in the senior public examination. Cookson went on to study for her BSc at the University of Melbourne and graduated in 1916 with majors in botany and zoology.
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Alessandra Giliani
1307 - 1326 (19 years)
Alessandra Giliani was thought to be an Italian natural historian, best known as the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy and pathology. However, the historical evidence for her existence is limited. Some scholars consider her to be a fiction invented by Alessandro Machiavelli . whilst others hold that the participation of a woman in anatomy at that time was so shocking that she has been edited out of history.
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Helen Dean King
1869 - 1955 (86 years)
Helen Dean King was an American biologist. She was involved in breeding the Wistar lab rat, a strain of rats genetically homogeneous albinos intended for use in biological and medical research. Life and work Born at Owego, New York, she graduated from Vassar College in 1892, and in 1899 she received her doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, with a thesis supervised by embryologist and geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. She had majored in morphology. She remained at the College after graduation as a fellow and student assistant in biology from 1897 to 1904.
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Willey Glover Denis
1879 - 1929 (50 years)
Willey Glover Denis was an American biochemist and physiologist. She was noted particularly for her collaborations with Otto Folin, including studies of protein metabolism. She was a pioneer in the field of clinical chemistry and the measurement of protein in biological fluids
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Cornelia Clapp
1849 - 1934 (85 years)
Cornelia Maria Clapp was an American educator and zoologist, specializing in marine biology. She earned the first Ph.D. in biology awarded to a woman in the United States from Syracuse University in 1889, and she would earn a second doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1896. Clapp was the first female researcher employed at the Marine Biological Laboratory, as well as its first female trustee. She was rated one of the top 150 zoologists in the United States in 1903, and her name was starred in the first five editions of American Men of Science .
Go to Profile#3741
Thekla Resvoll
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Thekla Susanne Ragnhild Resvoll was a Norwegian botanist and educator. She was a pioneer in Norwegian natural history education and nature conservation together with her sister, Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen.
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Lilian Vaughan Morgan
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Lilian Vaughan Morgan was an American experimental biologist who made seminal contributions to the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, although her work was obscured by the attention given her husband, Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan. Lilian Morgan published sixteen single-author papers between 1894 and 1947. Probably her most significant scientific contribution was the discovery of the attached-X chromosome and an entirely new pattern of inheritance in Drosophila in 1921. She also discovered the closed or ring-X chromosome in 1933. Both are important research tools today.
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Alice Middleton Boring
1883 - 1955 (72 years)
Alice Middleton Boring was an American biologist, zoologist, and herpetologist, who taught biology and did research in the United States and China. Early life and education Alice Middleton Boring was born in 1883 in Philadelphia. Her family originally settled in the Americas in the 17th century. Her relatives were involved in the Moravian Church, which would greatly influence Alice's upbringing. Boring attended the Friends' Central School, a coeducational school where she excelled in the sciences.
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Albertina Carlsson
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Albertina Carlsson , was a Swedish zoologist. She is referred to as the first Swedish woman to have performed scientific studies in zoology. Carlsson was born to taylor A.P. Carlsson and A.M. Jönsson. She was given private tuition and educated herself at the Högre lärarinneseminariet in Stockholm, 1865–68. She was employed as a teacher at the Paulis elementarläroverk för flickor in 1870–81 and at Södermalms högre läroanstalt för flickor in 1881–1907.
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Grunya Sukhareva
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
Grunya Yefimovna Sukhareva was a Soviet child psychiatrist. Biography Sukhareva was born in Kyiv to the Jewish family of Chaim Faitelevich and Rachil Iosifovna Sukhareva. Between 1917 and 1921, she worked in a psychiatric hospital in Kyiv. From 1921, she worked in Moscow, and from 1933 to 1935 she was leading the department of Psychiatry in Kharkiv University .
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Tilly Edinger
1897 - 1967 (70 years)
Johanna Gabrielle Ottilie "Tilly" Edinger was a German-American paleontologist and the founder of paleoneurology. Personal life Early life Tilly Edinger was born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1897. Her father, Ludwig Edinger, founded Frankfurt's first neurological research institute, providing Edinger with multiple contacts in the scientific community that helped drive her career. She was the youngest of three siblings. Her brother Fritz was killed during the Holocaust and her sister Dr. Dora Lipschitz emigrated to the United States. As a teenager, Edinger began to lose her hearing. She required hearing aids, and as an adult she was completely deaf and could not hear without them.
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Frieda Robscheit-Robbins
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Frieda S. Robscheit-Robbins was a German-born American pathologist who worked closely with George Hoyt Whipple, conducting research into the use of liver tissue in treatment of pernicious anaemia, co-authoring 21 papers between 1925 and 1930. Whipple received a Nobel Prize in 1934 in recognition of this work, but Robscheit-Robbins was not recognized in this award, although Whipple did share the prize money with her. Had she won the Nobel Prize alongside Whipple, Robscheit-Robbins would have been the second woman after Marie Curie to win the prestigious international award, and the first American woman to do so.
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Mieko Kamiya
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Mieko Kamiya was a Japanese psychiatrist who treated leprosy patients at Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium. She was known for translating books on philosophy. She worked as a medical doctor in the Department of Psychiatry at Tokyo University following World War II. She was said to have greatly helped the Ministry of Education and the General Headquarters, where the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers stayed, in her role as an English-speaking secretary, and served as an adviser to Empress Michiko. She wrote many books as a highly educated, multi-lingual person; one of her books, titled On the Me...
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Rosalind Pitt-Rivers
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Rosalind Venetia Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers FRS was a British biochemist. She became the second president of the European Thyroid Association in 1971; she succeeded Jean Roche and was followed by Jack Gross in this position, all three names inextricably linked with the discovery of the thyroid hormone triiodothyronine .
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Elizabeth Blackwell
1707 - 1758 (51 years)
Elizabeth Blackwell was a botanical illustrator and author who was best known as both the artist and engraver for the plates of "A Curious Herbal", published between 1737 and 1739. The book illustrated medicinal plants, and was designed as a reference work for the use of physicians and apothecaries.
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