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,
#3701
Harriette Cushman
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Harriette Eliza Cushman was the first female Extension Service poultry specialist in the United States, a lifelong supporter of the arts, an environmental advocate, and an honorary member of the Blackfoot tribe.
Go to Profile#3702
Ethel Katherine Crum
1886 - 1943 (57 years)
Ethel Katherine Crum was an American botanist, noted for collecting and studying California flora, as well as serving as assistant curator of the University of California Herbarium. She discovered and formally described at least 13 species and varieties of plants.
Go to Profile#3703
Lucy Mabel Hall-Brown
1843 - 1907 (64 years)
Lucy M. Hall-Brown was an American physician and writer. She was a general practitioner and a physician at the Sherborn Reformatory for Women, now the Massachusetts Correctional Instituion – Framingham.
Go to Profile#3704
Constance Margaret Eardley
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Constance Margaret Eardley was an Australian systematic botanist, lecturer and curator. She was the first woman appointed to the Council of the Royal Society of South Australia. Early life and education Constance Margaret Eardley was born in Fullarton, South Australia on 6 September 1910. Her mother was an historian and her father, Frederick William Eardley , was an accountant who served as registrar at the University of Adelaide. She completed her secondary education at Walford Anglican School for Girls, receiving honours in the leaving certificate. She was later president of its alumni asso...
Go to Profile#3705
Flora Murray
1896 - 1968 (72 years)
Flora Buchan Murray was a New Zealand botanist, and was the second woman appointed as permanent staff at Canterbury University College. Early life and education Flora Buchan Murray was born in New Zealand on 1 August 1896 to parents the Reverend Charles and Grace Jane Murray. She grew up in Carterton, near Wellington, and was educated at Christchurch Girls' High School. She enrolled at Canterbury University College in 1915, and was the winner of the prize in zoology for 1916–1917. Murray graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1920, and followed this with an MA with first class Honours in Botany in 1921.
Go to Profile#3706
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.
Go to Profile#3707
Eugénie Henderson
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Eugénie Jane Andrina Henderson was a British linguist and academic, specialising in phonetics. From 1964 to 1982, she was Professor of Phonetics at the University of London. She served as Chair of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain from 1977 to 1980, and President of the Philological Society from 1984 to 1988.
Go to Profile#3708
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.
Go to Profile#3709
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.
Go to Profile#3710
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.
Go to Profile#3711
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.
Go to Profile#3712
Ruth Bleier
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
Ruth Harriet Bleier was an American neurophysiologist who is also one of the first feminist scholars to explore how gender biases have shaped biology. Her career consisted of combining her academic interests with her commitment to social justice for women and the lower-class.
Go to Profile#3713
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.
Go to Profile#3714
Marie Stopes
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse.
Go to Profile#3715
Harriet Robinson
Harriet Latham Robinson is an American vaccine researcher who is founder and Chief Scientific Officer Emeritus at GeoVax. She is the former Chief of Microbiology and Immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Microbiology at Emory University. Her research considered HIV vaccine development. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#3716
Winifred Cullis
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Winifred Cullis was a physiologist and academic, and the first woman to hold a professorial chair at a medical school. Early life and education Born in Gloucester, Winifred was the youngest daughter of the six children of Frederick John and Louisa Cullis. Her brother Cuthbert Edmund Cullis became a mathematician. The family moved to Birmingham in 1880. She was initially educated at a middle school, the Summer Hill School, and at 16 transferred to the associated King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham and took extra science classes at Mason College.
Go to Profile#3717
Liliana Lubińska
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Liliana Lubińska was a Polish neuroscientist known for her research on the peripheral nervous system and her discovery of bidirectional axoplasmic transport. She and her husband Jerzy Konorski founded the Department of Neurophysiology at the Nencki Institution in 1946
Go to Profile#3718
Nancy Sullivan
Nancy Jean Sullivan is an American cell biologist researching filovirus immunology and vaccine development. She is a senior investigator and chief of the biodefense research section at the Vaccine Research Center. Her team discovered the monoclonal antibody, mAb114.
Go to Profile#3719
Myra Keen
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Angeline Myra Keen was an American malacologist and invertebrate paleontologist. She was an expert on the evolution of marine mollusks. With a PhD in psychology. Keen went from being a volunteer, identifying shells at Stanford, and having no formal training in biology or geology, to being one of the world's foremost malacologists. She was called the "First Lady of Malacology".
Go to Profile#3720
Ragna Rask-Nielsen
1900 - 1998 (98 years)
Ragna Marie Jenny Rask-Nielsen née Jensen was a Danish biochemist and medical researcher. After she earned a PhD with a dissertation on the development of carcinogenic tumors in mice in 1948, she carried out laboratory-based studies on antibody-producing tumors. In 1963, her groundbreaking work on viruses causing cancerous lymphoma was published in the journal Nature. When she died at the age of 97, she left her large fortune to a research foundation.
Go to Profile#3721
Constance Endicott Hartt
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Constance Endicott Hartt was a U.S. botanist notable for her research on sugarcane. She was born in Passaic, New Jersey. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1922. She taught at St. Lawrence University and Connecticut College. She also worked as a botanist for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association. Hartt died in Hawaii in 1984.
Go to Profile#3722
Marjorie Roloff Stetten
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
Marjorie Roloff Stetten was an American biochemist whose carbohydrate metabolism research led to the advancements in biomedical knowledge of enzymes and biosynthesis and the discovery of AICA ribonucleotide. During her career, she was an investigator at the National Institutes of Health and a research professor of experimental medicine at Rutgers Medical School.
Go to Profile#3723
Rosalind Wulzen
1886 - Present (140 years)
Rosalind Wulzen was an American physiologist, known for her discovery of the "Anti-Stiffness Factor," or "Wulzen Factor." Born in Oakland, California, Wulzen attended the University of California Berkeley for her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.
Go to Profile#3724
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.
Go to Profile#3725
Charlotte Auerbach
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Charlotte "Lotte" Auerbach FRS FRSE was a German geneticist who contributed to founding the science of mutagenesis. She became well known after 1942 when she discovered with A. J. Clark and J. M. Robson that mustard gas could cause mutations in fruit flies. She wrote 91 scientific papers, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Royal Society of London.
Go to Profile#3726
Honor Fell
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Dame Honor Bridget Fell, DBE, FRS was a British scientist and zoologist. Her contributions to science included the development of experimental methods in organ culture, tissue culture, and cell biology.
Go to Profile#3727
Angélique Arvanitaki
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Angélique Arvanitaki was a French neurophysiologist who did research on the electrical activity of neurons using the large nerve fibres of several different molluscs. Life Angélique Arvanitaki was of Greek origin and was born in Cairo on 11 July 1901. In 1942, she married Nick Chalazonitis, who was a student in veterinary medicine at the time, and would himself become a neurophysiologist too. Their daughter Alcmene Chalazonitis, born in 1943, later also became a neuroscientist.
Go to Profile#3728
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.
Go to Profile#3729
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...
Go to Profile#3730
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.
Go to Profile#3731
Mary Alice McWhinnie
1922 - 1980 (58 years)
Mary Alice McWhinnie was an American biologist, professor at DePaul University and an authority on krill. From Chicago, Illinois, she was the first woman to sail for two months in Antarctic waters aboard the NSF's research vessel, USNS Eltanin. The National Science Foundation eventually allowed her to winter over at McMurdo Station and in 1974, she became the first American woman to serve as chief scientist at an Antarctic research station.
Go to Profile#3732
Eeva Jalavisto
1909 - 1966 (57 years)
Eeva Jalavisto was a Finnish Professor of physiology and an influential researcher and policy maker in the areas of health and social care of the elderly as well as wider gerontology. Early life and education Born in Kerimäki to Chief Physician Dr and Ines Meurman, Eeva Elmgren completed her secondary education at the Helsingin Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu, graduating in 1927.
Go to Profile#3733
Gabriela Balicka-Iwanowska
1867 - 1962 (95 years)
Gabriela Balicka-Iwanowska was a Polish botanist, activist, and legislator. Her botanical research focused on the plant taxonomy of Iris, Tremandraceae and marine algae. Biography Gabriela Iwanowska was born on 16 May 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, the third daughter of Antoni Iwanowski, a government official, and Sybilla Rosenwerth who hailed from a family of landowners. However, her mother died when Gabriela was a young child, in 1874, and her father died only ten years later, leaving Gabriela and her sisters orphaned but well-off members of Warsaw's social elite.
Go to Profile#3734
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.
Go to Profile#3736
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.
Go to Profile#3737
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.
Go to Profile#3738
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.
Go to Profile#3740
Michalina Stefanowska
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Michalina Stefanowska was a Polish neurophysiologist and biologist. She was a member of the Poznań Society of Friends of Sciences and the second woman to become a member of the Polish Academy of Learning.
Go to Profile#3741
Inez Whipple Wilder
1871 - 1929 (58 years)
Inez Whipple Wilder , born Inez Luanne Whipple, was an American herpetologist and anatomist, affiliated with Smith College from 1902 until her death. She made notable contributions to the study of fingerprints and the biology of salamanders.
Go to Profile#3742
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.
Go to Profile#3743
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.
Go to Profile#3744
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...
Go to Profile#3745
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.
Go to Profile#3746
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.
Go to Profile#3748
Henrietta Hooker
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Henrietta Edgecomb Hooker was an American botanist and professor at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary . She was the second female doctoral graduate in botany at Syracuse University, which made her one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in botany from any U.S. university.
Go to Profile#3749
Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen
1873 - 1943 (70 years)
Hanna Marie Resvoll-Holmsen was a Norwegian botanist – a female pioneer in Norwegian natural history education and nature conservation together with her sister, Thekla Resvoll. Life Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen suffered much from illness in her childhood and school attendance after her 12th year was sporadic. She took a high school exam in 1902, at which time she had also an unhappy marriage behind her. She studied natural history at the Royal Frederik's University in Kristiania and graduated in botany in 1910. From 1921, she was docent in plant geography at the same university, a position she held...
Go to Profile#3750
Lois Lampe
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Lois Lampe was an American botanist and educator. She taught at various levels for nearly 50 years at the Ohio State University before retiring and becoming assistant professor emerita in 1966. She was a member of six scientific societies and four honors societies during her teaching career.
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