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
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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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.
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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...
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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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Fanny Langdon
1864 - 1899 (35 years)
Fanny E. Langdon was an American zoologist known for her work with invertebrate sensory organs and nervous systems. Langdon was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire and attended a normal school, teaching for three years in New Hampshire before pursuing undergraduate studies in zoology and botany at the University of Michigan in 1891. She earned her bachelor's degree in 1896 and her master's degree in 1897. After earning her degrees, she became an instructor in botany and zoology at the University of Michigan, and researched at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1897. ...
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Carlotta Case Hall
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Carlotta Case Hall was an American botanist and university professor who collected and published on ferns. She also co-authored a handbook on the plants of Yosemite National Park. Biography Carlotta Hall was born in Kingsville, Ohio, in 1880 to Adelaide Percy Case and Quincy A. Case. She studied botany at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in 1904. In 1910 she married the botanist Harvey Monroe Hall, with whom she had a daughter, Martha, in 1916.
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Mathilde Carmen Hertz
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Mathilde Carmen Hertz was a biologist, and was one of the first influential women scientists in the field of biology and a pioneer in the field of comparative psychology. Working in Germany, her career started to unravel in 1933 due to her Jewish ancestry. She was the younger daughter of the famous physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.
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Elva Lawton
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Elva Lawton was an American botanist and bryologist known for her research on ferns early in her career and her late-career comprehensive study of the mosses of the Western United States. Early life and education Elva Lawton was born in West Middletown, Pennsylvania on April 3, 1896. Prior to matriculating at university, she was an elementary school teacher in Pennsylvania from 1915 to 1919. She attended the University of Pittsburgh for her bachelor's degree, which she earned in 1923, and her master's degree, which she earned in 1925. From 1923 to 1925 she was also a high school biology and Latin teacher in Crafton, Pennsylvania.
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Ida Maclean
1877 - 1944 (67 years)
Ida Smedley Maclean was an English biochemist and the first woman admitted to the London Chemical Society. Early life and education Ida was born in Birmingham to William Smedley, a businessman, and Annie Elizabeth Duckworth. She was taught by her mother at home until the age of nine and lived in "a cultured and progressive home". She was educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham from 1886 to 1896, when she won a scholarship and began her studies at Newnham College, Cambridge. In the university's Natural Sciences Tripos she got a first class in part one and a second class in part two, studying chemistry and physiology.
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Edith Grace White
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Edith Grace White was an American zoologist known for her studies of elasmobranchs . She was a professor of biology at Wilson College, and was a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
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Gladys Dick
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Gladys Rowena Henry Dick was an American physician who co-developed an antitoxin and vaccine for scarlet fever with her husband, George F. Dick. Biography Gladys Rowena Henry was born in Pawnee City, Nebraska in 1881 and earned her B.S. in zoology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1900. She was a member of the Pi Beta Phi chapter at the University of Nebraska. Because her mother initially objected to Gladys attending medical school, she took graduate classes at Nebraska until 1903, then moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Graduated in 1907 with her M.D., she then trained for a year at the University of Berlin.
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Mary Sophie Young
1872 - 1919 (47 years)
Mary Sophie Young was a botanist at the University of Texas significant for her field trips where she collected large quantities of specimens making her a key contributor to plant taxonomy in Texas.
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Erna Mohr
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Erna W. Mohr was a German zoologist who made contributions to ichthyology and mammalogy. Mohr was long associated with the Zoological Museum Hamburg, where she was successively head of the Fish Biology Department, Department of Higher Vertebrates, and Curator of the Vertebrate Department. She was a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and held an honorary doctorate from the University of Munich.
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Elizabeth Ann Bartholomew
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Elizabeth Ann Bartholomew was an American botanist dedicated to the study of plant systematics. Early life Bartholomew was born on June 14, 1912, in Wheeling, West Virginia. Influenced by her naturalist father, she became interested in the natural sciences at a young age. When she was 12 Bartholomew joined the Girl Scouts, and she subsequently earned all of the nature badges. After high school, Bartholomew attended West Virginia University. She became interested in botany during her freshman year after taking a class taught by Perry Daniel Strausbaugh.
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Marian E. Hubbard
1868 - 1956 (88 years)
Marian Elizabeth Hubbard was an American zoologist and associate professor of zoology at Wellesley College, where she taught for over 40 years. Early life Marian Elizabeth Hubbard was born in McGregor, Iowa, to parents Rodolphus and Hanna Hubbard, In 1886 she graduated from McGregor school. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary until 1889 and graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.S. in 1894.
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Portia Holman
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Portia Grenfell Holman was an Australian child psychiatrist who practiced in London. Early life and education Holman was born in 1903 in Sydney; she was the only child of William Holman, who would become the Premier of New South Wales, and Ada Augusta Holman, a writer. She gained a Bachelor of Arts at The Women's College of the University of Sydney, and in 1923 she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in economics in 1926. She then went on to study at the University of Paris and the London School of Economics, before taking up a role in lecturing and research at the University of St Andrews from 1927 to 1933.
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Mary Welleck Garretson
1896 - 1971 (75 years)
Mary Welleck Garretson was an American geologist. Garretson had a passion for teaching earlier in her career, obtaining her first job at the Young Men's Christian Association . From 1921 to 1923, she instructed an introductory geology course, which happened to be the first geology course conducted through this institution. Garretson was subsequently employed as a consultant within the fields of paleontology and stratigraphy.
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Kitty Ponse
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Kitty Ponse was a Swiss zoologist and endocrinologist. She was a professor at the University of Geneva and received the Swiss Otto Naegeli Prize in 1961. Life and career Ponse was born in Sumatra, then part of the Dutch East Indies, to Dutch parents in 1897. At the age of eight she and her family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where she later studied science at the University of Geneva. She completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Geneva in 1922 that focused on embryological development. While the focus of her earlier research and publications was pure zoology, including tail regenerat...
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Helen Jean Brown
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Dr. Helen Jean Bromley was an American botanist and phycologist noted for her study of the algal family Vaucheriaceae. She earned her PhD from Ohio State University, in 1929. She published using her maiden name, and served as both an instructor of botany and registrar at the University of Connecticut. She was married to entomologist Stanley Willard Bromley.
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Helena Krzemieniewska
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
Helena Krzemieniewska was a Polish botanist and microbiologist, noted for studying myxobacteria and myxophyta in soil. Works
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Regina Kapeller-Adler
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Regina Kapeller-Adler, born Regina Kapeller, was an Austrian biochemist who, in 1934, devised an innovative test for early pregnancy based on the detection of histidine in urine. As a Jew, she was forced to leave Austria following the country's annexation into Nazi Germany in the Anschluss and went to work with the noted geneticist Francis Crew at the Institute of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh.
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Kathleen Sampson
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Kathleen Sampson was an English mycologist and plant pathologist, with a focus in herbage crops and cereal diseases. She was a leading authority on smut fungi growing in the British Isles. Early life Sampson was born on 23 November 1892 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She received her Bachelor of Science from Royal Holloway College, University of London in 1914. During her study Sampson was awarded the London University Gilchrist Scholarship for Women in 1913, and the Driver Scholarship for Botany in 1914 as well as being awarded the Driver essay prize in 1914. She graduated with her Masters in ...
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Margery Knight
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Margery Knight was an algologist, artist and lecturer at the Port Erin Marine Biological Station, University of Liverpool. Career Knight was a lecturer in botany at University of Liverpool from 1912 until she retired in 1954. She was based at the University’s Port Erin Marine Biological Station on the Isle of Man.
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Clara Lynch
1882 - 1985 (103 years)
Clara J. Lynch was an American biologist and cancer researcher, who notably pioneered the use of the Swiss laboratory mouse in cancer research. Background Clara Lynch was born on March 6, 1882, in Canton, Ohio, and died on December 8, 1985, in Arlington, Virginia, at the age of 103. She never married but did have two nieces named Marcia and Eliza Miller. Lynch was born to her parents William A. Lynch and Eliza R. Underhill. Her father was a prominent attorney during his time. Lynch had two other siblings named Alice Allen Lynch and Frances H. Lynch, both of whom also lived to adulthood.
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Lillien Jane Martin
1851 - 1943 (92 years)
Lillien Jane Martin was an American psychologist. She published over twelve books. Martin experienced ageism and sexism as an early woman in psychology. Early life and education Lillien Jane Martin was born on July 7, 1851, at Olean, New York. At the age of four, she entered the nearby Olean Academy. At the age of sixteen, her talents were recognized such that she became a teacher at a girls' school in Wisconsin. By the age of 26, in 1876, she had earned enough money to return to her native New York where she enrolled at Vassar College at Poughkeepsie, New York.
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Lilias Armstrong
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
Lilias Eveline Armstrong was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as well as the phonetics and tone of Somali and Kikuyu. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for 50 years. Armstrong also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu.
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Winifred Josephine Robinson
1867 - 1962 (95 years)
Winifred Josephine Robinson was an American botanist, educator, and educational administrator. As a botanist, she studied ferns and wrote several papers and books. She was the first dean of the Women's College of the University of Delaware, which was founded in 1914.
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Ida Kraus Ragins
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Ida Kraus Ragins, née Kraus , was a Russian Empire-born American biochemist. Life and work Ida Kraus Ragins was born in the Russian Empire and moved to the United States before 1915. That year she started work as an assistant in quantitative analysis in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Chicago, possibly as a student job, as she received her B.A. in 1918 and her M.S. from the university the following year. Kraus Ragins taught for a year at the Oklahoma College for Women, before returning to Chicago to work on her Ph.D. which she received in 1924. She then worked as an instructor...
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Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock
1851 - 1936 (85 years)
Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock was one of only 13 American women to receive their doctorates in chemistry during the 19th-century, and was the first woman to receive a doctorate in Philosophy of Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Sarah P. Monks
1846 - 1926 (80 years)
Sarah Preston Monks was an American naturalist, educator, scientific illustrator, and poet, based for much of her career in San Pedro, California. Monks was the first zoology instructor at Los Angeles State Normal School, a precursor to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught for over 20 years, and published on diverse topics including reptiles, amphibians, spiders, and marine biology.
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Kathleen Bever Blackburn
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Kathleen Bever Blackburn, was a British botanist best remembered for the 1923 discovery that plant cells have sex chromosomes. Her principal contributions were in plant cytology and genetics. She was also a pioneer of pollen analysis. She taught botany at Armstrong College, Durham University from 1918 to 1957.
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Mathilde Lange
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Mathilde Margarethe Lange was an American biologist known for her research in experimental embryology. She was born in New York City and her father was a physician and surgeon. She attended the University of Zurich and earned her Ph.D. in 1920. She was employed by the United States Department of Agriculture for the first year following her Ph.D. as a researcher. Lange then moved to Wheaton College, Massachusetts as a professor of zoology, where she remained until her retirement in 1950. Her professional memberships included the New York Academy of Growth and the Genetic Association.
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Carrie Adeline Barbour
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Carrie Adeline Barbour was an American paleontologist and educator. As an assistant curator of paleontology at the University of Nebraska State Museum and an Assistant Professor of Paleontology, Barbour was among the earliest women paleontologists in the United States.
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Julia Warner Snow
1863 - 1927 (64 years)
Julia Warner Snow was an American botanist and was known in the scientific community for her work as a systematic phycologist. Snow was born in La Salle, Illinois, the third child of Norman G. Snow and Charlotte D. . At the age of sixteen she left La Salle to enter Hungerford Collegiate Institute, Adams, New York. After graduating in 1880, she returned home to live with her parents, then in 1884 matriculated to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. While an undergraduate, she joined the Kappa Alpha Theta fraternity. When the Sigma Xi honor society was formed at Cornell in 1886, Julia joined along with fellow Theta Anna Botsford Comstock.
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Ida Shepard Oldroyd
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Ida Shepard Oldroyd was an American conchologist and Curator of Geology at Stanford University for over 20 years, who curated what was for a time the second largest collection of mollusk shells in the world. Oldroyd and her husband, Tom Shaw Oldroyd, amassed one of the largest private shell collections in California. Ida was recognized as an active and early pioneer of conchology in the western United States. She was a charter member of the American Malacological Union, of which she served as vice-president in 1934 and as honorary president from 1935 to 1940.
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Elizabeth Marianne Blackwell
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Elizabeth "Elsie" Marianne Blackwell was an English botanist and mycologist, known as an expert on Phytophthora. She was the president of the British Mycological Society for a one-year term from 1942 to 1943.
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Helen Riaboff Whiteley
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
Helen Riaboff Whiteley was a microbiologist who spent most of her research career at the University of Washington. Early life and education Whiteley was born in 1921 to Russian parents in Harbin, China. The family immigrated to the United States in 1924, first settling in Washington and later moving to California. Whiteley studied microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her B.S. in 1941. She then earned a master's degree from the University of Texas, Galveston and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, where her husband Arthur Whiteley was at the time an assistant professor of zoology.
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Stina Stenhagen
1916 - 1973 (57 years)
Stina Lisa Stenhagen was a Swedish biochemist who was active in the fields of medical chemistry and chemical ecology. Together with her husband she carried out groundbreaking research into the chemical composition of tubercular bacteria. In 1963, she was appointed professor of medical chemistry at Gothenburg University, so becoming the institution's first female professor. She and her colleagues later applied gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to investigate how pheromones allow communications between insects as well as between insects and plants, developing interest in a field which ...
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Florence Meier Chase
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Florence Elizabeth Meier Chase was an American botanist who researched the interaction of sunlight and algae at the Smithsonian. She was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an honorary member of the Washington Botanical Society. She was married to Dr. William Wiley Chase and also assisted in his publication of articles on scientific and medical topics.
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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.
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Kono Yasui
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Kono Yasui was a Japanese biologist and cytologist. In 1927, she became the first Japanese woman to receive a doctoral degree in science. She received a Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon and was awarded as an Order of the Precious Crown Third Class for her academic accomplishments and leadership in women’s education in Japan.
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