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
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.
Go to Profile#3702
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
Go to Profile#3703
Maria Pavlova
1854 - 1938 (84 years)
Maria Vasilievna Pavlova was a Ukrainian who became a paleontologist and academician in Moscow during the Russian Empire and Soviet era. She is known for her research on the fossils of and the naming of hoofed-mammals of the Tertiary period. She was a professor at Moscow State University. She also made great efforts to establish the Museum of Paleontology at the university. In 1926, the museum was named after her and her second husband, Alexei Petrovich Pavlov, a geologist, paleontologist, and academician who made a significant contribution in the field of stratigraphy.
Go to Profile#3704
Margaret Jane Benson
1859 - 1936 (77 years)
Margaret Jane Benson was an English botanist specialising in paleobotany, and one of the first female members of the Linnean Society of London. Most of her career was spent as the head of the Department of Botany at Royal Holloway College, University of London from 1893 to 1922. In 1927, a botanical laboratory was dedicated in her name. She travelled extensively with Ethel Sargant, collecting specimens, laboratory equipment, and meeting other botanists around the world. Her students included Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, Theodora Lisle Prankerd, Nesta Ferguson, and Emily Mary Berridge.
Go to Profile#3705
Ethel Sargant
1863 - 1918 (55 years)
Ethel Sargant was a British botanist who studied both the cytology and morphology of plants. She was one of the first female members of the Linnean Society and the first woman to serve on their council. She was the first woman to preside over a Section of the British Association. At Cambridge, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of Girton College in 1913 and also became President of the British Federation of University Women from 1913 until 1918.
Go to Profile#3706
Marie Taylor
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Marie Clark Taylor was an American botanist, the first woman to earn a science doctorate at Fordham University, and the Head of the Botany Department at Howard University from 1947 to her retirement in 1976. Her research interest was plant photomorphogenesis.
Go to Profile#3707
Marcella Boveri
1863 - 1950 (87 years)
Marcella Boveri was an American biologist. She was married to the German biologist Theodor Boveri . Their daughter Margret Boveri became one of the best-known post-war German journalists. Life She was born Marcella O'Grady in Boston, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She attended Girls' High School in Boston. She studied with William Thompson Sedgwick at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she became the first woman to receive a degree in biology from MIT. After she completed her post-graduate studies in Harvard University O'Grady worked as an assistant to the zoologist Edmund Beecher Wilson at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#3708
Sidnie Manton
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Sidnie Milana Manton was an influential British zoologist. She is known for making advances in the field of functional morphology. She is regarded as being one of the most outstanding zoologists of the twentieth century.
Go to Profile#3709
Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker
1901 - 1957 (56 years)
Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker was a British phycologist, known for her research on the edible seaweed Porphyra laciniata , which led to a breakthrough for commercial cultivation. Kathleen Drew-Baker's scientific legacy is revered in Japan, where she has been named Mother of the Sea. Her work is celebrated each year on April 14. A monument to her was erected in 1963 at the Sumiyoshi shrine in Uto, Kumamoto, Japan.
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Evelyn M. Anderson
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Evelyn M. Anderson was an American physiologist and biochemist, most known for her co-discovery of adrenocorticotropic hormone in 1934. Background Evelyn Anderson was born in Willmar, Minnesota, to Swedish immigrants parents. She attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she obtained her bachelor's. In 1928, she gained her M.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Medicine. During her time at Berkeley, her research culminated into two papers about vitamin A and nutrition. She continued on to receive her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Montreal in 1934.
Go to Profile#3711
Dora Jacobsohn
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Dora Elisabeth Jacobsohn was a German-Swedish physiologist and endocrinologist. Considered one of the early pioneers of the field of neuroendocrinology, she is best known for her work with Geoffrey Harris showing that the anterior pituitary gland is controlled by the hypothalamus via the hypophyseal portal system.
Go to Profile#3712
Mary Belle Allen
1922 - 1973 (51 years)
Mary Belle Allen was an American botanist, chemist, mycologist, algologist, and plant pathologist, and a pioneer of biochemical microbiology. With Daniel I. Arnon and F. Robert Whatley, she did breakthrough research discovering and demonstrating the role of chloroplasts in photosynthesis. In 1962 she received the Darbaker Prize from the Botanical Society of America for her work on microbial algae. In 1967 she was nominated jointly with Arnon and Whatley for a Nobel Prize.
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Silvia Zenari
1895 - 1956 (61 years)
Silvia Zenari was an Italian geologist and botanist. Zenari was born in Udine, Italy and studied at the University of Padua, graduating in 1918. While working for the Istituto di Geologia, Zenari studied the Dolomites in Belluno, Cadore, and Comelico between 1930 and 1950, eventually turning her focus on botany as well as geology. She was the first to complete a study on the ecology of plant life at high elevations, primarily in the Sexten Dolomites range. She later moved on to studying the Schiara range, including Monte Serva. Her research included a statistical analysis of plants at various elevations, which explained the distribution of various species.
Go to Profile#3714
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.
Go to Profile#3715
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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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.
Go to Profile#3720
Katharine Bishop
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Katharine Julia Scott Bishop was a trained anatomist, medical physician, researcher and educator best known for co-discovering Vitamin E. Early life In 1889, Bishop was born in New York as Katharine Scott, to Walter and Katherine Emma Scott. She attended the Somerville High School for high school and later received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in 1910. After taking premedical courses at Radcliffe College, Bishop went on to graduate from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and earned her medical degree in 1915.
Go to Profile#3721
Edith Banfield Jackson
1895 - 1977 (82 years)
Edith Banfield Jackson was a child psychiatrist who developed the rooming-in model of maternal and infant care. Jackson was professor in pediatrics and psychology at the Yale School of Medicine from 1936 to 1959. She directed the Yale Rooming-in Research Project at Grace-New Haven Community Hospital from 1946 to 1953. Upon retiring from Yale, Jackson moved to Colorado, where she directed the Rooming-in Unit at Colorado General Hospital from 1962 to 1970.
Go to Profile#3722
Miriam Elizabeth Simpson
1894 - 1991 (97 years)
Miriam Elizabeth Simpson was an American scientist who in 1921 earned the first Ph.D. in anatomy conferred from the University of California. Two years later, she was awarded Doctor of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University .
Go to Profile#3723
Esther Killick
1902 - 1960 (58 years)
Esther Margaret Killick was an English physiologist who was a professor of physiology at the London School of Medicine for Women from 1941 until her death in 1960. Her main research interests lay in respiratory physiology and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Go to Profile#3724
Hattie Alexander
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Hattie Elizabeth Alexander was an American pediatrician and microbiologist. She earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1930 and continued her research and medical career at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Alexander became the lead microbiologist and the head of the bacterial infections program at Columbia-Presbyterian. She occupied many prestigious positions at Columbia University and was well honored even after her death from liver cancer in 1968. Alexander is known for her development of the first effective remedies for Haemophilus influenzae infection, as well as being one of the first scientists to identify and study antibiotic resistance.
Go to Profile#3725
Wanda Zabłocka
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Wanda Zabłocka was a Polish botanist, phytopathologist and mycologist. She was a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń . Zabłocka was the author of mycology and phytopathology works, including mycorrhiza of Viola . She is also the author of several books about fungi for the general public.
Go to Profile#3726
Fahire Battalgil
1902 - 1948 (46 years)
Fahire Battalgil was a Turkish ichthyologist who was one of the first women to be appointed as a professor at a university in Turkey. Name Battalgil was known as Fahire Akim Hanim during the early part of her life. The surname Battalgil was adopted by her family to comply with the Republic of Turkey's 1934 Surname Law and the spelling of this was changed to Battalgazi from 1943.
Go to Profile#3727
Eleanor Anne Ormerod
1828 - 1901 (73 years)
Eleanor Anne Ormerod was a pioneer English entomologist. Based on her studies in agriculture, she became one of the first to define the field of agricultural entomology. She published an influential series of articles on useful insects and pests in the Gardeners' Chronicle and the Agricultural Gazette along with annual reports from 1877 to 1900. These annual reports were produced by summarizing information provided by her network of correspondents from across Britain. Belonging to the landed gentry, she worked as an honorary consulting entomologist with the Royal Agricultural Society of England and received no pay for any of her work.
Go to Profile#3728
Emily Lovira Gregory
1841 - 1897 (56 years)
Emily Lovira Gregory was an American botanist born in Portage, New York. She began her educational career by receiving her Bachelor's of Arts from Cornell University in 1881, later earning a Ph.D. at the University of Zurich. This made her one of the first American women to earn a doctoral degree from a university in Europe. Gregory often found it difficult to find paid academic positions. She often would take on the unpaid positions because she could support herself. From 1890 to 1895 at the University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College she worked as a teaching fellow and lecturer respectively.
Go to Profile#3729
Helen Chambers
1879 - 1935 (56 years)
Helen Chambers CBE was a British pathologist and cancer expert whose findings on radium were essential in the fight against cervical cancer. Early life Chambers was born in Bombay, India, to Frederick Chambers. Her father was a member of the Indian Civil Service before returning the family back to Britain.
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Mary Isabel McCracken
1866 - 1955 (89 years)
Mary Isabel McCracken was an American entomologist, researcher and teacher. Career McCracken was born in Oakland, California in 1866. She began her teaching career at Oakland’s public schools. After a decade of teaching and at the age of 34 she enrolled at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#3731
Susan Hallowell
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Susan Hallowell was an American botanist and Professor of Botany at Wellesley College. She was a teacher and mentor of botanist Margaret Clay Ferguson. Life Hallowell began a teaching career shortly after graduating from Colby College.
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Carmel Humphries
1909 - 1986 (77 years)
Carmel Humphries MRIA B.Sc. M.Sc. PhD D.Sc. was an Irish zoologist, specialist in fresh water Chironomidae. She was the first female professor of zoology and head of department in Ireland, and devised a technique for the identification of chironomid flies that is still employed today.
Go to Profile#3733
Lydia DeWitt
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Lydia Maria DeWitt was an American pathologist and anatomist. Early life and education Lydia Maria Adams was born in Flint, Michigan to Oscar and Elizabeth Adams, the second of three children. Her father was an attorney. Elizabeth died when Lydia was five, leaving her sister, who later married Oscar, to raise Lydia and her siblings.
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Alice Haskins
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Alice Crane Haskins Swingle was an American government botanist. With her husband, botanist Deane Bret Swingle , she co-authored the 1928 book A Textbook of Systematic Botany. Life and career Haskins was born on 24 April 1880, in Acton, Massachusetts to Helen A. Crane and John R. Haskins. She graduated with a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1903. Haskins worked as a research assistant in the Plant Pathology Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture from 1903 to 1906.
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Elsie M. Burrows
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
Elsie May Burrows was an English botanist who made significant contributions to British postwar phycology. Her primary area of research was macroalgal ecology, focusing particularly on Fucus, a genus of brown algae, and Chlorophyta, a division of the green algae.
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Cornelia Channing
1938 - 1985 (47 years)
Cornelia "Nina" Channing was an American professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her research focused on endocrinology and fertility; along with longtime collaborators Neena Schwartz and Darrell Ward, she was involved in the discovery of hormones involved in regulating the female reproductive cycle. She died of breast cancer in 1985.
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Anna Kharadze
1905 - 1971 (66 years)
Anna Kharadze was a Soviet Georgian biologist, systematist, florist, botanist-geographer, collector, a specialist in the flora of Georgia and the Caucasus as a whole. Early life and education Anna Kharadze was born in the city of Elizavetpole in the family of a school teacher of natural sciences. She received her secondary education at a technical school in Tbilisi and then entered the biological department of the natural faculty of Tbilisi State University, from which she graduated in 1927.
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Käthe Hoffmann
1883 - Present (143 years)
Käthe Hoffmann was a German botanist who described many plant species in New Guinea and South East Asia including Annesijoa novoguineensis. She was a professor at Breslau, German Empire, and made a significant contribution to botany. In one study, she was found to have co-authored or authored 354 land plant species, the sixth-highest number authored by any female scientist. , Plants of the World Online lists 439 accepted genera and species which include Käthe Hoffmann in the authority, in some capacity.
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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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Kathleen E. Carpenter
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Kathleen E. Carpenter was a British freshwater ecologist. She is best known for her early studies of the effects of metal pollution on Welsh rivers and their biota, as well as her book Life in Inland Waters, the first textbook in English wholly devoted to freshwater ecology.
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Gudrun Ruud
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
Gudrun Marie Ruud was a Norwegian zoologist and educator. She is remembered for her pioneering embryological research based on experimentation with salamanders. Early life Born in Christiania, Ruud was the youngest daughter of a prosperous merchant, I.A. Ruud. She enjoyed a pleasant childhood in a large property with geese and poultry on the grounds. From an early age, she was attracted by the birds, animals and plants she encountered during her holidays in Østre Aker, just outside the capital. She first attended a teacher training establishment before embarking on science studies at the Royal Frederick University, graduating in 1913.
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Katherine Bitting
1869 - 1937 (68 years)
Katherine Golden Bitting was a food chemist for the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Canners Association. She was a prolific author on the topic of food preservation. To facilitate her investigations, as the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress states, she collected "materials on the sources, preparation, and consumption of foods, their chemistry, bacteriology, preservations, etc., from earliest times to the present day." She and her husband, Arvril Bitting, donated a significant collection of materials related to cookery to the Library of Congress. The Bitting...
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Maria Skalińska
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Maria Skalińska was a Polish botanist and professor who studied plant anatomy and cell biology, particularly the plants of the Tatra mountains. She was the first to describe the species Poa nobilis.
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Elise L'Esperance
1878 - 1959 (81 years)
Elise Depew Strang L'Esperance was an American pathologist and physician, a pioneer in establishing a preventive model of cancer treatment. She was a pathologist noted for establishing cancer prevention clinics in New York. She founded two clinics: the Strang Tumor Clinic in 1932 and the Strang Cancer Prevention Clinic in 1937, which operated out of the New York Infirmary. In 1940, L'Esperance opened a second branch of the Strang Cancer Prevention Clinic at the Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases. During her medical career, L'Esperance published her research prolifically, credited ...
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Annette Frances Braun
1884 - 1978 (94 years)
Annette Frances Braun was an American entomologist and leading authority on microlepidoptera, a grouping of mostly small and nocturnal moths. Her special interest was leaf miners: moths whose larvae live and feed from within a leaf.
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