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,
#3801
Ida Henrietta Hyde
1857 - 1945 (88 years)
Ida Henrietta Hyde was an American physiologist known for developing a micro-electrode powerful enough to stimulate tissue chemically or electronically, yet small enough to inject or remove tissue from a cell. Ida was agnostic in her religious standing. She retired at the age in 63 in the year 1920. After her retirement, Ida traveled to several places, including Switzerland, Austria, Egypt, India, and several locations in Germany. On August 22, 1945, Ida Hyde died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Ida Hyde is the great-aunt of biochemist Arthur Pardee.
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Cornelia Clapp
1849 - 1934 (85 years)
Cornelia Maria Clapp was an American educator and zoologist, specializing in marine biology. She earned the first Ph.D. in biology awarded to a woman in the United States from Syracuse University in 1889, and she would earn a second doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1896. Clapp was the first female researcher employed at the Marine Biological Laboratory, as well as its first female trustee. She was rated one of the top 150 zoologists in the United States in 1903, and her name was starred in the first five editions of American Men of Science .
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Thekla Resvoll
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Thekla Susanne Ragnhild Resvoll was a Norwegian botanist and educator. She was a pioneer in Norwegian natural history education and nature conservation together with her sister, Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen.
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Lilian Vaughan Morgan
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Lilian Vaughan Morgan was an American experimental biologist who made seminal contributions to the genetics of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, although her work was obscured by the attention given her husband, Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan. Lilian Morgan published sixteen single-author papers between 1894 and 1947. Probably her most significant scientific contribution was the discovery of the attached-X chromosome and an entirely new pattern of inheritance in Drosophila in 1921. She also discovered the closed or ring-X chromosome in 1933. Both are important research tools today.
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Alice Middleton Boring
1883 - 1955 (72 years)
Alice Middleton Boring was an American biologist, zoologist, and herpetologist, who taught biology and did research in the United States and China. Early life and education Alice Middleton Boring was born in 1883 in Philadelphia. Her family originally settled in the Americas in the 17th century. Her relatives were involved in the Moravian Church, which would greatly influence Alice's upbringing. Boring attended the Friends' Central School, a coeducational school where she excelled in the sciences.
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Albertina Carlsson
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Albertina Carlsson , was a Swedish zoologist. She is referred to as the first Swedish woman to have performed scientific studies in zoology. Carlsson was born to taylor A.P. Carlsson and A.M. Jönsson. She was given private tuition and educated herself at the Högre lärarinneseminariet in Stockholm, 1865–68. She was employed as a teacher at the Paulis elementarläroverk för flickor in 1870–81 and at Södermalms högre läroanstalt för flickor in 1881–1907.
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Grunya Sukhareva
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
Grunya Yefimovna Sukhareva was a Soviet child psychiatrist. Biography Sukhareva was born in Kyiv to the Jewish family of Chaim Faitelevich and Rachil Iosifovna Sukhareva. Between 1917 and 1921, she worked in a psychiatric hospital in Kyiv. From 1921, she worked in Moscow, and from 1933 to 1935 she was leading the department of Psychiatry in Kharkiv University .
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Tilly Edinger
1897 - 1967 (70 years)
Johanna Gabrielle Ottilie "Tilly" Edinger was a German-American paleontologist and the founder of paleoneurology. Personal life Early life Tilly Edinger was born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1897. Her father, Ludwig Edinger, founded Frankfurt's first neurological research institute, providing Edinger with multiple contacts in the scientific community that helped drive her career. She was the youngest of three siblings. Her brother Fritz was killed during the Holocaust and her sister Dr. Dora Lipschitz emigrated to the United States. As a teenager, Edinger began to lose her hearing. She required hearing aids, and as an adult she was completely deaf and could not hear without them.
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Frieda Robscheit-Robbins
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Frieda S. Robscheit-Robbins was a German-born American pathologist who worked closely with George Hoyt Whipple, conducting research into the use of liver tissue in treatment of pernicious anaemia, co-authoring 21 papers between 1925 and 1930. Whipple received a Nobel Prize in 1934 in recognition of this work, but Robscheit-Robbins was not recognized in this award, although Whipple did share the prize money with her. Had she won the Nobel Prize alongside Whipple, Robscheit-Robbins would have been the second woman after Marie Curie to win the prestigious international award, and the first American woman to do so.
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Mieko Kamiya
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Mieko Kamiya was a Japanese psychiatrist who treated leprosy patients at Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium. She was known for translating books on philosophy. She worked as a medical doctor in the Department of Psychiatry at Tokyo University following World War II. She was said to have greatly helped the Ministry of Education and the General Headquarters, where the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers stayed, in her role as an English-speaking secretary, and served as an adviser to Empress Michiko. She wrote many books as a highly educated, multi-lingual person; one of her books, titled On the Me...
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Rosalind Pitt-Rivers
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Rosalind Venetia Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers FRS was a British biochemist. She became the second president of the European Thyroid Association in 1971; she succeeded Jean Roche and was followed by Jack Gross in this position, all three names inextricably linked with the discovery of the thyroid hormone triiodothyronine .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ruth Margery Addoms
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Ruth Margery Addoms , was an American botanist at Duke University specializing in the study of plant anatomy and plant physiology. She contributed to the study of growth-promoting substances in plants.
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Eva Mameli
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Giuliana Luigia Evelina Mameli , was an Italian botanist, and naturalist. A native of Sassari, in Sardinia, in 1906 she moved to Pavia with her brother Efisio Mameli, chemist and pharmacologist at the local university, where in 1907 she graduated in Natural Sciences. In 1915 she obtained the libera docenza. While a junior lecturer at the University of Pavia, she married agronomist Mario Calvino. In 1920 Mario offered Eva Mameli a job as Head of the Botany Department of the Agricultural Experiment Station in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, where the couple went to live and where in 1923 their first child, Italo Calvino, was born.
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Maria von Linden
1869 - 1936 (67 years)
Maria von Linden was a German bacteriologist and zoologist. She was the first woman admitted to study at the University of Tübingen, and became one of the first women in Germany to be given the academic title of “Professor”. She patented a type of bandage and won a prize for her research on butterfly wings. She was driven from office due to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.
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Rachel Bodley
1831 - 1888 (57 years)
Rachel Littler Bodley was an American professor, botanist, and university leader. She was best known for her term as Dean of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania . She helped found the American Chemical Society in New York City.
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Elizabeth Stern
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Elizabeth Stern was a Canadian-born American pathologist, especially well known for her insights on the cell's progression from a healthy to a cancerous state. Stern was one of the first scientists specializing in cytopathology, the study of diseased cells.
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Zinaida Botschantzeva
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Zinaida Petrovna Botschantzeva was a Soviet and Russian botanist, cytologist, embryologist, and professor of the Tashkent university. Botschantzeva came from a large Cossack family. In 1930 she graduated with a biology degree from the National University of Uzbekistan. In 1930-1933 she participated in expeditions to study the flora of Central Asia. Her research advisor was Alexei Ivanovich Vvedensky.
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Lidia Palladievna Sergievskaya
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Lidia Palladievna Sergievskaya was a Soviet botanist, professor, and herbarium curator. She described over 100 plants.
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Mary Alice Willcox
1856 - 1953 (97 years)
Mary Alice Willcox was an American zoologist and professor at Wellesley College. Early life and education In 1856, Mary was born in Kennebunk, Maine, the eldest of three children of the congregational minister William H. Willcox and his wife Annie Holmes née Goodenow. Theirs was a distinguished family in Maine; her great grandfather, John Holmes, was one of the state's first senators, while her grandfather, Daniel Goodenow, was justice of the Supreme Court of Maine. Her brother, Walter Francis Willcox, became professor of economics and statistics at Cornell University.
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Chiara Cirelli
#3824
Wilmatte Porter Cockerell
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Wilmatte Porter Cockerell was an American entomologist and high school biology teacher who discovered and collected a large number of insect specimens and other organisms. She participated in numerous research and collecting field trips including the Cockerell-Mackie-Ogilvie expedition. She wrote several scientific articles in her own right, co-authored more with her husband, Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell, and assisted him with his prolific scientific output. She discovered and cultivated red sunflowers, eventually selling the seeds to commercial seed companies. Her husband and her entomologi...
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Norah Lillian Penston
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Norah Lillian Penston was a British botanist and academic administrator. She was principal of Bedford College, University of London, from 1951 to 1964. Early life and education Nora Penston was the daughter of A. J. Penston. She was educated at the Bolton School and St Anne's College, Oxford where she obtained a BA in botany in 1927. She studied under W. O. James, researching the potassium nutrition of potatoes for her DPhil, which she gained in 1930.
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Mary C. Lobban
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Mary Constance Cecile Lobban was a British physiologist who studied circadian rhythms. Lobban was a Senior Demonstrator in Physiology in the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge from 1955 to 1959. From 1959 to 1974 she worked at the National Institute for Medical Research's Hampstead laboratories.
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Nellie M. Payne
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Nellie M. Payne was an American entomologist and agricultural chemist. Her research on insect responses to low temperature had practical agricultural and environmental applications. Early life and education Emily Maria de Cottrell Payne was born in 1900, in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, daughter of James E. Payne Sr. and Mary Emmeline Cottrell Payne. Her father was superintendent of an agricultural station. She had two brothers, Amos and James. She earned a bachelor's and master's degrees in agricultural chemistry and entomology from the Kansas State Agricultural College, and a Ph.D. in 1925 from the University of Minnesota.
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Sally Hughes-Schrader
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Sally Peris Hughes-Schrader was a professor of zoology at Duke University, 1962–1966. Sally P. Hughes was born in Hubbard, Oregon. Hughes was accepted at Columbia University where she majored in protozoology and obtained her M.A. in 1922, completing her Ph.D. at Columbia in 1924. She taught at Bryn Mawr College and later at Columbia University. She was Professor of Zoology and the head of the Biology Department at Barnard College. Hughes performed the first complete dissection of the cranial nerves of the dogfish and made studies of hapoidy, parthenogenesis, hermaphroditism, and the life cycl...
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Edith Layard Stephens
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Edith Layard Stephens was a South African botanist, a leading authority on algae and fungi, particularly edible and poisonous mushrooms. Early life and education Stephens was born on December 6, 1884 in Cape Town, Cape Colony, as the daughter of Michael Stephens, who was a chief locomotive superintendent of the Cape Government Railways and Annie Hoskyn. In 1901, she matriculated at the Rustenburg School for Girls in Rondebosch, Cape Town. She studied at the South African College and later that year received the Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Cape of Good Hope. In 1906, Stephans...
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Georgina Sweet
1875 - 1946 (71 years)
Georgina Sweet was an Australian zoologist and women's rights activist. She was the first woman to graduate with a Doctor of Science from the University of Melbourne, and was the first female acting professor in an Australian university.
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Freda Bage
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Anna Frederika Bage was an Australian biologist, university professor and principal and women's activist. Bage was born in 1883 and studied at Oxford High School for girls and Fairlight School. In 1907, Bage received her Masters of Science from the University of Melbourne and began an extensive career. Bage worked as a junior demonstrator in Biology and in 1908 won the King's College scholarship and in 1909 travelled to London working under Arthur Dendy which led Bage receiving a fellowship by the Linnean Society in 1910–11. Bage returned to the University of Melbourne where she worked as ...
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Doris Mackinnon
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Doris Mackinnon was a British zoologist. Born in Scotland, her father was a Consular Agent and her mother managed a "women's home". Influenced by Maria Gordon, Mackinnon studied botany and geology at Aberdeen University, graduating in 1906. She received the "Carnegie scholarship", studying abroad for two years before returning to Scotland. She achieved her doctorate from Aberdeen University in 1914, becoming a lecturer at University College, Dundee , in 1916.
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Charlotte Maria King
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Charlotte Maria King was a botanist, mycologist and agronomist who worked at the Iowa State College Agricultural Experiment Station. Written works Articles Louis Hermann Pammel, Charlotte M. King. 1925. Some New Weeds of Iowa. Circular 98 . Agric. Experiment Station, Iowa State College of Agric. & Mechanic Arts, 16 p. 1925King, Charlotte M. stalk and corn root diseases in Iowa. Agric. Experiment Station, Iowa State College of Agric. and Mechanic Arts, 8 p. 1915King, Charlotte M. Four new fungous diseases in Iowa. Agric. Experiment Station, Iowa State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, 21 p.
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Winifred Betts
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Mary Winifred Aitken was a New Zealand botanist. She was the first female lecturer at the University of Otago. Biography Born in Nelson on 11 May 1894, Betts was the daughter of printer and stationer Alfred George Betts and Ada Betts . Known to friends as Winnie, she was educated at Nelson College for Girls and received her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Otago. On her graduation, she received the National Research Scholarship that was awarded at the university each year, which offered her an income of £100 a year, plus lab expenses, so she could con...
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Mary Hefferan
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Mary Hefferan was an American bacteriologist and community leader. She earned her PhD in zoology in 1903 in Chicago. Life and work Mary Hefferan was born in Eastmanville, Ottawa County, Michigan. and graduated from Central High School. She attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees there in 1896 and 1898, respectively. She received her PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1903 with a dissertation on bacteriology.
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Ida Augusta Keller
1866 - 1932 (66 years)
Ida Augusta Keller was an American plant physiologist and teacher in Philadelphia. Early life and family Ida Keller was born in on June 11, 1866 to William Charles Christian and Maria Augusta Keller in Darmstadt, Grand Duchy of Hesse, while her parents were visiting their former home. She grew up in Philadelphia, where her father was a physician, and was graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1884.
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Vivi Laurent-Täckholm
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Vivi Laurent-Täckholm was a Swedish botanist and children's book writer, active in Egypt. Early years and education Vivi Laurent-Täckholm was the daughter of Dr. Wilhelm Edvard Laurent and Lilly Jenny Karolina Bergstrand. She was the sister of Torbern Laurent and aunt to Torvard C. Laurent. She studied botany at the University of Stockholm and received her degree in 1921. She traveled to the US from 1921 to 1923. In 1926, she married botany professor Gunnar Täckholm . They moved to Egypt the same year and began work on the flora of Egypt.
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Nathalie A. Desjatova-Shostenko
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Nathalie A. Desjatova-Shostenko , later Nathalie A. Roussine, was a Russian-French botanist noted for identifying at least 70 species of plants, many in the genus Thymus. Between 1925 and 1930, Natalie Shostenko was a director of Botany Department at Askania-Nova, after 1930 she then directed the Department of Geography at the Ukrainian Institute of Applied Botany. In 1944 she emigrated to France, due to return of the Soviet regime to Ukraine.
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Angeliki Panagiotatou
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Angeliki Panagiotatou was a Greek physician and microbiologist. She was the first woman physician in modern Greece to have graduated from a University in Greece . Life Born in Greece, Panagiotatou and her sister Alexandra were the first two female students to be accepted in the medical school at Athens University in 1893, after having proved that there were not formal law banning women from attending university in Greece. In 1897, she became he first woman to graduate from the Medical School in Athens.
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Lucy Mary Cavanagh
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
Lucy Mary Cavanagh was an American botanist and plant collector, noted for her identification of several species of bryophytes. Works
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Sarah Hynes
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Sarah Hynes was a Kingdom of Prussia-born, Australian botanist and teacher. Sarah Hynes was born on 30 September 1859 in Danzig, Prussia to William John Hynes , a master mariner and his wife Eliza Bell. Sarah was educated at Edinburgh Ladies' College, Upton House in St John's Wood, London, and at Chichester College in Sussex. She earned a botanical certificate from South Kensington Museum, Science and Art Department.
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Maria Isabel Hylton Scott
1889 - 1990 (101 years)
María Isabel Sofia Hylton Scott y Pacheco was an Argentine zoologist, malacologist and teacher. She is known as the first woman in Argentina who obtained a doctorate in Zoology. She described at least 1 family, 47 species and 4 subspecies of Mollusca.
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Hally Jolivette Sax
1884 - 1979 (95 years)
Hally Delilia Mary Jolivette Sax , was an American botanist known for her work on the chromosomal structure of plant species and how it is affected by radiation and other mutagens. Biography Hally Jolivette received her A.B. in 1906 and her A.M. in 1909 — both from the University of Wisconsin — and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1912. She taught at the University of Wisconsin , Stanford , and Washington State College . While at the latter institution, she met and in 1915 married the botanist Karl Sax, one of her cytology students. They later had three sons.
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Cornelia Mitchell Downs
1892 - 1987 (95 years)
Cornelia "Cora" Mitchell Downs was an American microbiologist and journalist who completed extensive work in the areas of immunofluorescence and tularemia research. Downs was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas to parents Lily Louis Campbell Downs and Henry Mitchell Downs. She remained at the University of Kansas for much of her educational, teaching, and research careers.
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Vera Danchakoff
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Vera Mikhaĭlovna Danchakoff was an anatomist, cell biologist and embryologist from the Russian Empire. In 1908 she was the first woman in Russian Empire to be appointed as a professor and she became a pioneer in stem cell research. She emigrated to the United States in 1915 where she was a leading exponent of the idea that all types of blood cell develop from a single type of cell. She has sometimes been called "the mother of stem cells". She later returned to Europe to continue with her research.
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Sarah Bedichek Pipkin
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
Sarah Craven Bedichek Pipkin was an American geneticist. Education Pipkin earned her B.A. in Zoology and Ph.D in Genetics from the University of Texas, where she studied with J. T. Patterson and H. J. Muller. She was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship to King's College, London and studied under J. B. S. Haldane.
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Mary Jane Guthrie
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Mary Jane Guthrie was an American zoologist and cytologist known for her studies of cytoplasm in reproductive and endocrine cells. Early life and education Guthrie was born in New Bloomfield, Missouri. She graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor's degree in 1916 and a master's degree in 1918, then earned her Ph.D. in zoology at Bryn Mawr College in 1922. While working towards her Ph.D., Guthrie served as a zoology instructor and demonstrator.
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Miriam Augusta Palmer
1878 - 1977 (99 years)
Miriam Augusta Palmer was an American professor of entomology and zoology, scientific artist and sculptor. Biography Miriam Augusta Palmer was born on August 28, 1878, in Mont Clare, United States of America. She graduated from the University of Kansas. After completing her master's degree in 1904, she joined as a scientific illustrator at the experiment station of the Colorado Agricultural College, now known as Colorado State University, and continued until 1928.
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Deborah Rabinowitz
1947 - 1987 (40 years)
Deborah Rabinowitz was an ecologist who coined the seven meanings of rarity in the field of plant ecology,. She was a professor in the Section of Ecology and Systematics at Cornell University. Early life and education Rabinowitz was born and raised in Willimantic, Connecticut, to Louis and Margaret Rabinowitz. She attended public schools and later received her undergraduate degree in biology from New College of Florida in Sarasota. In 1975, she received her Ph.D. in theoretical population biology from the University of Chicago.
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Helen Spurway
1917 - 1978 (61 years)
Helen Spurway was a British biologist and the second wife of J. B. S. Haldane. She emigrated to India in 1957 along with him and conducted research in field biology with Krishna Dronamraju, Suresh Jayakar, and others. Sometimes known as Helen Spurway-Haldane.
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