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,
#3801
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#3802
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#3803
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#3804
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#3805
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#3806
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#3807
Helen Porter
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Prof Helen Kemp Porter later Mrs Huggett FRS FRSE was a British botanist from Imperial College London. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the first female professor at Imperial College London. Her studies of polysaccharide metabolism in tobacco plants were groundbreaking; she was one of the first British scientists to use the innovative technologies of chromatography and radioactive tracers.
Go to Profile#3808
Ethel de Fraine
1879 - 1918 (39 years)
Ethel de Fraine was a British botanist. Life and work Ethel Louise de Fraine was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England on 2 November 1879 and received her D.Sc. from the University of London. She was a lecturer in botany at Battersea Polytechnic from 1910 to 1913 and then taught at Westfield College in 1915. She died at Falmouth, Cornwall, England on 25 March 1918.
Go to Profile#3809
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.
Go to Profile#3810
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...
Go to Profile#3811
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.
Go to Profile#3812
Adah Elizabeth Verder
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Adah Elizabeth Verder was an American medical bacteriologist and science administrator. She was a researcher in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' intramural research program specialized in gastrointestinal flora and staphylococci, pseudomonas, and pleuropneumonia organisms. Verder later served as chief of the bacteriology and mycology branch in the extramural division of NIAID. She was a fellow of several societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Public Health Association, American Academy of Microbiology, and the New York ...
Go to Profile#3813
Gerta von Ubisch
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Gerta von Ubisch was a German physicist, geneticist, and botanist. She studied barley and found a genetic explanation for heterostyly. In 1933 she lost her position at Heidelberg University because of her Jewish heritage.
Go to Profile#3814
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#3815
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#3816
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.
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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#3818
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.
Go to Profile#3819
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.
Go to Profile#3820
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#3821
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#3822
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.
Go to Profile#3823
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#3824
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#3825
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#3826
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.
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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#3828
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."
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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.
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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...
Go to Profile#3831
Ana Aslan
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Ana Aslan was a Romanian biologist and physician of partial Armenian descent, born Anna Aslanyan, specialist in gerontology, academician from 1974 and the director of the National Institute of Geriatrics and Gerontology .
Go to Profile#3832
Jean Hanson
1919 - 1973 (54 years)
Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...
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Margaret Morse Nice
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Margaret Morse Nice was an American ornithologist, ethologist, and child psychologist who made an extensive study of the life history of the song sparrow and was author of Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow . She observed and recorded hierarchies in chicken about three decades ahead of Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who coined the term "pecking order". After her marriage, she made observations on language learning in her children and wrote numerous research papers.
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Marjory Stephenson
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Marjory Stephenson was a British biochemist. In 1945, she was one of the first two women elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the other being Kathleen Lonsdale. She wrote Bacterial Metabolism , which ran to three editions and was a standard textbook for generations of microbiologists. A founder of the Society for General Microbiology, she also served as its second president. In 1953, the Society established the Marjory Stephenson Memorial Lecture in her memory. This is the Society's principal prize, awarded biennially for an outstanding contribution of current importance in microbiology.
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Ethelwynn Trewavas
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Ethelwynn Trewavas was an ichthyologist at the British Museum of Natural History. She was known for her work on the families Cichlidae and Sciaenidae. She worked with Charles Tate Regan, another ichthyologist and taxonomist.
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Rosa Smith Eigenmann
1858 - 1947 (89 years)
Rosa Smith Eigenmann was an American ichthyologist , as well as a writer, editor, former curator at the California Academy of Sciences, and the first librarian of the San Diego Society of Natural History. She "is considered the first woman ichthyologist in the United States." Eigenmann was also the first woman to become president of Indiana University's chapter of Sigma Xi, an honorary science society. She authored twelve published papers of her own between 1880 and 1893, and collaborated with her husband, Carl H. Eigenmann, as "Eigenmann & Eigenmann" on twenty-five additional works between 1888 and 1893.
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Muriel Robertson
1883 - 1973 (90 years)
Muriel Robertson , was a Scottish protozoologist and bacteriologist at the Lister Institute, London from 1915 to 1961. She made key discoveries of the life cycle of trypanosomess. She was one of the founding members of the Society for Microbiology , along with Alexander Fleming and Marjory Stephenson.
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Clara H. Hasse
1880 - 1926 (46 years)
Clara Henriette Hasse was an American botanist whose research focused on plant pathology. She is known for identifying the cause of citrus canker, which was threatening crops in the Deep South. Biography Hasse attended the University of Michigan. While at U of M, she was appointed an assistant in botany in 1902. Hasse was a founding member of the Women's Research Club at U of M as women were not allowed in the Research Club at the time. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1903 with a PhB, she went to Washington, D.C., to take up an appointment as assistant horticulturist and botanist in the Bureau of Plant Industry at the U.S.
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Johanna Westerdijk
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Johanna Westerdijk was a Dutch plant pathologist and the first female professor in the Netherlands. Early life Johanna Westerdijk, called "Hans" by friends, was born on 4 January 1883 in Nieuwer-Amstel, a small village south of Amsterdam, and died on 15 November 1961 at 78 years old in Baarn, Netherlands.
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Carrie Derick
1862 - 1941 (79 years)
Carrie Matilda Derick was a Canadian botanist and geneticist, the first female professor in a Canadian university, and the founder of McGill University's genetics department. Early life and education Born in the Eastern Townships in Clarenceville, Canada East in 1862, Derick was educated at the Clarenceville Academy . She began teaching by the age of fifteen. Derick later received teacher training at the McGill Normal School, graduating in 1881 as a Prince of Wales Gold Medal winner. She then went on to become a school teacher in Clarenceville and Montreal, and later serving as a principal ...
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Julia Bell
1879 - 1979 (100 years)
Julia Bell was a pioneering English human geneticist. Biography She attended Girton College in Cambridge and took the Mathematical Tripos exam in 1901. But because women could not officially receive degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, she was awarded a master's degree at Trinity College, Dublin for her work investigating solar parallax at Cambridge Observatory. In 1908, she moved to University College London and obtained a position there as an assistant in statistics.
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Ruth F. Allen
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Ruth Florence Allen was an American botanist and plant pathologist and the first woman to earn her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Wisconsin. Her doctorate research focused on the reproduction and cell biology of ferns, particularly the phenomenon of apogamy . Later in her career, Allen shifted her focus to plant pathology. Her major contribution to the field of mycology was furthering the understanding of rust fungi, a group of economically important plant pathogens. Allen completed many studies on Puccinia graminis, once considered a catastrophically damaging disease-causing agent i...
Go to Profile#3843
Wilhelmine Key
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Wilhelmine "Minnie" Marie Enteman Key was an American geneticist. She was the first woman to gain a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago, where she studied coloration in paper wasps. She contributed to the study of eugenics and was an influential teacher to Sewall Wright.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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#3850
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.
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