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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Biology,
#401
Kay Davies
#37139
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dame Kay Elizabeth Davies is a British geneticist. She is Dr Lee's Professor of Anatomy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. She is director of the Medical Research Council functional genetics unit, a governor of the Wellcome Trust, a director of the Oxford Centre for Gene Function, and a patron and Senior Member of Oxford University Scientific Society. Her research group has an international reputation for work on Duchenne muscular dystrophy . In the 1980s, she developed a test which allowed for the screening of foetuses whose mothers have a high risk of ca...
Go to Profile#402
Virginia Zakian
#49888
Overall Influence
Virginia Zakian is the Harry C. Wiess Professor in the Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She is the director of the Zakian Lab, which has done important research in topics such as telomere-binding protein, telomere recombination, and telomere position effects, at Princeton University. She is a fellow at the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science., and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences . Zakian served as the chair of "Princeton's Task force on the Status of Women Faculty in ...
Go to Profile#403
Kathleen Treseder
#45615
Overall Influence
Kathleen Kay Treseder is an American ecologist who specializes in the interplay between global climate change and fungal ecology. She also serves as a member of the Irvine City Council after being elected to the position in 2022. She is currently a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Ecological Society of America.
Go to Profile#404
Lindsey A. Criswell
#35256
Overall Influence
Lindsey A. Criswell is an American rheumatologist and physician-scientist. She is director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. Criswell was vice chancellor of research at University of California, San Francisco where she held the Jean S. Engleman Distinguished Professorship in Rheumatology.
Go to Profile#405
Ruth Gates
#52913
Overall Influence
1962 - 2018 (56 years)
Ruth Deborah Gates was the Director of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology and the first woman to be President of the International Society for Reef Studies. Her research was dedicated to understanding coral reef ecosystems, specifically coral-algal symbiosis and the capacity for corals to acclimatize under future climate change conditions. Doctor Gates is most accredited with looking at coral biology and human-assisted coral evolution, known as super corals, as notably seen in the documentary Chasing Coral, available on Netflix.
Go to Profile#406
Sophie Scott
#27720
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sophie Kerttu Scott is a British neuroscientist and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow at University College London . Her research investigates the cognitive neuroscience of voices, speech and laughter particularly speech perception, speech production, vocal emotions and human communication. She also serves as director of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Go to Profile#407
Uta Francke
#62077
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Uta Francke is a German-American physician-geneticist known for her accomplishments in mapping genes to specific chromosome locations and discovering the genes and underlying mutations responsible for Prader-Willi and Rett syndromes. Her work on detailed mapping of human chromosome laid the foundation of the Human Genome Project and discovery of many other rare genetic disorders. She is currently a professor of Genetics and Pediatrics Emerita at Stanford University. She has also served as a consultant to 23andMe Inc since 2007, and as a part-time employee from 2010-2013.
Go to Profile#408
Victoria Arbour
#52312
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Victoria Megan Arbour is a Canadian evolutionary biologist and vertebrate palaeontologist at Royal BC Museum, where she is Curator of Palaeontology. An "expert on the armoured dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs", Arbour analyzes fossils and creates 3-D computer models. She named the possible pterosaur Gwawinapterus from Hornby Island, and a partial ornithischian dinosaur from Sustut Basin, British Columbia , and has participated in the naming of the ankylosaurs Zuul, Zaraapelta, Crichtonpelta, and Ziapelta.
Go to Profile#409
Nancy Wexler
#15233
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Nancy Wexler FRCP is an American geneticist and the Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, best known for her involvement in the discovery of the location of the gene that causes Huntington's disease. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology but instead chose to work in the field of genetics.
Go to Profile#410
Leah Keshet
#32868
Overall Influence
Leah Edelstein-Keshet is an Israeli-Canadian mathematical biologist. Edelstein-Keshet is known for her contributions to the field of mathematical biology and biophysics. Her research spans many topics including sub-cellular biology, ecology, and biomedical research, with particular focus on cell motility and the cytoskeleton, modeling of physiology and diseases, such as autoimmune diabetes, and swarming and aggregation behavior in social organisms.
Go to Profile#411
Madeline Lancaster
#62055
Overall Influence
Madeline Lancaster is an American developmental biologist studying neurological development and diseases of the brain. Lancaster is a group leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.
Go to Profile#412
Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath
#27423
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath is an Indian neuroscientist. She is currently a professor at the Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. She was the founder director of the National Brain Research Centre, Gurgaon and founder chair of the Centre for Neuroscience at Indian Institute of Science. Her main area of interest is the study of brain related disorders including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. She serves as the founding director of the Centre for Brain Research in Bangalore.
Go to Profile#413
Susan Mango
#35810
Overall Influence
Susan E. Mango is an American biologist, the former H.A. and Edna Benning Professor of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah, and former professor at Harvard University. She is Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology and research group leader at Biozentrum University of Basel
Go to Profile#414
Diana Wall
#61258
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Diana Harrison Wall is the founding director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability, a distinguished biology professor, and senior research scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. She is an environmental scientist and a soil ecologist and her research has focussed on the Antarctic McMurdo Dry Valleys. Wall investigates ecosystem processes, soil biodiversity and ecosystem services and she is interested in how these are impacted by global change. The Wall Valley was named after her in recognition of her research in the McMurdo Dry Valleys....
Go to Profile#415
Mary Eleanor Power
#70543
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Mary Eleanor Power is Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Power is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the California Academy of Sciences. She holds an honorary doctorate from Umeå University, Sweden, and is a recipient of the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography , and the Kempe Award for Distinguished Ecologists .
Go to Profile#416
Deborah Doniach
#39817
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Deborah Doniach MD FRCP was a British clinical immunologist and pioneer in the field of autoimmune diseases. Early and personal life Deborah Abileah was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on 6 April 1912 to Russian parents. Her father, Arieh Abileah , of Jewish descent, was a concert pianist and music teacher; her mother, Fée Héllès, of Russian-German descent , ran a novel dance school in Paris. The family moved frequently during Deborah's childhood, living at various times in Paris, Vienna and Italy.
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Susan S. Taylor
#58534
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Susan Taylor is an American biochemist who is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a Professor of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. She is known for her research on protein kinases, particularly protein kinase A. She was elected to the Institute of Medicine and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1996.
Go to Profile#418
Margaret Leinen
#45545
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Margaret Leinen is an American paleoceanographer and paleoclimatologist. In 2013, Leinen was appointed the 11th director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as the dean of the School of Marine Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She founded the Climate Response Fund, a non-profit focused on enabling better understanding, regulation and responsible use of climate engineering research, and served as its president for a time. For two years, Leinen also worked as chief science officer for a startup company in green technology and climate change mitigation.
Go to Profile#419
Maharani Chakravorty
#50427
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Maharani Chakravorty was an Indian molecular biologist. She organized the first laboratory course on recombinant DNA techniques in Asia and Far East in 1981. Early life Chakravorty was born in 1937 in Kolkata. She cultivated an interest in science and mathematics due to the influence of her maternal grandfather. She matriculated in 1950, graduated with a B.Sc from Presidency College, Kolkata, obtained her M.Sc from the prestigious Rajabazar Science College, University of Calcutta and a PhD from the Bose Institute, Kolkata.
Go to Profile#420
Carol A. Barnes
#44438
Overall Influence
Carol A. Barnes is an American neuroscientist who is a Regents' Professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Since 2006, she has been the Evelyn F. McKnight Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging and is director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute. Barnes has been president of the Society for Neuroscience and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and foreign member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Go to Profile#421
Virginia Walbot
#70630
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Virginia Walbot is an American agriculturalist and botanist who is a professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. She investigates maize development with a focus on factors involved in male sterility.
Go to Profile#422
Pamela Matson
#29625
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#423
Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz
#58283
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz is a Senior Group Leader at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and a founding member of the Neuronal Cell Biology Program at Janelia. Previously, she was the Chief of the Section on Organelle Biology in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program, in the Division of Intramural Research in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 2016. Lippincott-Schwartz received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and performed post-doctoral training with Richard Kl...
Go to Profile#424
Natalia Pasternak Taschner
#56775
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Natalia Pasternak Taschner is a Brazilian microbiologist, author, and science communicator. She is the first president of the Instituto Questão de Ciência . She was director of the Brazilian arm of the science festival, Pint of Science , columnist for the Brazilian national newspaper "O Globo", for The Skeptic magazine , and Medscape . She also hosts two weekly radio shows “The hour of Science” at Brazil's CBN national radio station. Taschner is also the publisher of Brazil's first magazine on critical thinking, Revista Questao de Ciencia.
Go to Profile#425
Janet Hemingway
#48176
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Janet Hemingway is a British infectious diseases specialist. She is the former Director of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and founding Director of Infection Innovation Consortium and Professor of Tropical Medicine at LSTM. She is current President of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Go to Profile#426
Tatiana Birshtein
#37852
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Tatiana Birshtein or Tat'yana Maksimovna Birshtein was a Russian molecular scientist. Birshtein specialised in the physics of polymers. In 2007 she was given the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.
Go to Profile#427
Xiaohong Rose Yang
#35435
Overall Influence
Xiaohong Rose Yang is an American biomedical scientist researching the genetics of dysplastic nevus syndrome and chordoma, and etiologic heterogeneity of breast cancer. She is a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute. Yang leads breast cancer studies in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.
Go to Profile#428
Barbara A. Schaal
#25088
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Barbara Anna Schaal American scientist, evolutionary biologist, is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and served as vice president of the National Academy of Sciences from 2005 to 2013. She is the first woman to be elected vice president of the academy. From 2009 to 2017, Schaal served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .
Go to Profile#429
Frances Brodsky
#63791
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Frances Brodsky is an American cell biologist. She is known for her work on clathrin and its role in the function of the immune system. She is a professor of cell biology and the director of the Division of Biosciences at University College London. She is the author of three scientific mystery novels under the pseudonym B.B. Jordan. She was the founding editor of the journal Traffic.
Go to Profile#430
Adelina Barrion
#62742
Overall Influence
1951 - 2010 (59 years)
Adelina Adato Barrion was a Filipino entomologist and geneticist whose extensive contribution to the study of Philippine spiders earned her the moniker "Asia's Spider Woman," although she also contributed significantly to the study of other species, and to the study of genetics in general.
Go to Profile#431
Anita Hoffmann
#64901
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Ana Esther Hoffmann Mendizábal , also known as Anita Hoffmann, was a Mexican researcher, educator, academic, and biologist specializing in acarology and parasitology. She was a pioneer in the study of arachnids and acari in Mexico. She founded the Instituto Politécnico Nacional's Laboratory of Acrology in 1965, the first in Latin America, and another at the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1977.
Go to Profile#432
Hermona Soreq
#45165
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hermona Soreq is an Israeli professor of Molecular Neuroscience at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Best known for her work on the signaling of acetylcholine and its relevance in stress responses and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Go to Profile#433
Sally Satel
#8140
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sally L. Satel is an American psychiatrist based in Washington, D.C. She is a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine, a visiting professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and an author.
Go to Profile#434
Mary Sears
#20796
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Mary Sears was a Commander in the United States Naval Reserve and an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution . Early life and education Mary Sears was born on July 18, 1905, to Leslie and Edmund Sears in Wayland, Massachusetts. She was the oldest child, and had a younger brother and sister. In 1911, Leslie died from polio when she was 28-years-old. After his wife's death, Edmund moved to Europe and left his children in the care of relatives and nannies. During this time, one of their caretakers was their mother's friend, Sophie Bennett, who was a teacher at The Winsor School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#435
W. Ann Reynolds
#5177
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Wynetka Ann Reynolds is an American zoologist and university administrator who has served as provost of the Ohio State University , chancellor of the California State University system , chancellor of the City University of New York , and president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham . She is the only person to have headed two of the three largest systems of higher education in the United States. The universities she has led account for 6 of the top 10 U.S. schools in upward mobility for their students.
Go to Profile#436
Eva Harris
#34864
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eva Harris is a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder and president of the Sustainable Sciences Institute. She focuses her research efforts on combating diseases that primarily afflict people in developing nations.
Go to Profile#437
Seirian Sumner
#55672
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Seirian Sumner FRES is a British entomologist and behavioural ecologist. She is a professor at University College London and is an expert in social wasps. Education and career Sumner was educated at Ysgol Gyfun. Aberaeron, Wales and then at University College London where she was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and in 1999 was awarded a PhD on Conflicts over reproduction in facultatively eusocial hover wasps'. Her postdoctoral work was with Jacobus Boomsma at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark; she then held fellowships at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and at the Institute of Zoology, London.
Go to Profile#438
Leonore Herzenberg
#62445
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Leonore Alderstein "Lee" Herzenberg is an American immunologist, geneticist and professor at Stanford University. Born in New York City, U.S.A., she never received a college degree but studied biology and worked as a researcher alongside her husband Leonard since he began his doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in 1952. At the time, Caltech did not accept women, but although she was registered at Pomona College nearby, Lee was allowed to audit courses and take tests at Caltech.
Go to Profile#439
Janet E. Mertz
#33080
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Janet E. Mertz is an American biochemist, molecular biologist, and cancer researcher. She is currently the Elizabeth McCoy Professor of Oncology in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Mertz is best known for disputing Lawrence Summers' 2005 suggestion that women lack the intrinsic aptitude to excel in mathematics at the highest level and for discovering an easy method for joining DNAs from different species. This latter finding initiated the era of genetic engineering whose ramifications form the basis of modern genetics and the biotechnology in...
Go to Profile#440
Christine Holt
#49959
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Christine Elizabeth Holt FRS, FMedSci is a British developmental neuroscientist. She has been Professor of Developmental Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, since 2003 and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, since 1997.
Go to Profile#441
Sabeeha Merchant
#63054
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Sabeeha Sabanali Merchant is a professor of plant biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the photosynthetic metabolism and metalloenzymes In 2010 Merchant led the team that sequenced the Chlamydomonas genome. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
Go to Profile#442
Anna Marie Pyle
#60213
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Anna Marie Pyle is an American academic who is a Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and a Professor of Chemistry at Yale University. and an Investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Pyle is the president of the RNA Society, the vice-chair of the Science and Technology Steering Committee at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and previously she served as chair of the Macromolecular Structure and Function A Study Section at the National Institutes of Health.
Go to Profile#443
Michal Linial
#57512
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Michal Linial is a Professor of Biochemistry and Bioinformatics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . Linial is the Director of The Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology at HUJI. Since 2015, she is head of the ELIXIR-Israel node .
Go to Profile#444
Karen A. Matthews
#69822
Overall Influence
Karen A. Matthews is an American health psychologist known for her research on the epidemiology and risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, early signs of coronary heart disease risk in children, women's health and menopause, and connections between socioeconomic status and health. She is Professor Emerita of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#445
Olga Troyanskaya
#58423
Overall Influence
Olga G. Troyanskaya is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and the Deputy Director for Genomics at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Biology in NYC. She studies protein function and interactions in biological pathways by analyzing genomic data using computational tools.
Go to Profile#446
Suzanne Hand
#67143
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Suzanne J. Hand is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, a teacher of geology and biology, who has a special interest in vertebrate palaeontology and modern mammals. Her research has been published in over a hundred articles, and is especially focused on the subjects of evolutionary biology, functional morphology, phylogenetics, and biogeography. Hand is a co-leader of the research team investigating the Riversleigh World Heritage Area, regarded as one of the four most important sites of fossil-bearing formations in the world.
Go to Profile#447
Sandra Díaz
#30116
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Sandra Myrna Díaz ForMemRS is an Argentine ecologist and professor of ecology at the National University of Córdoba. She studies the functional traits of plants and investigates how plants impact the ecosystem.
Go to Profile#448
Olive Mary Hilliard
#60809
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
Olive Mary Hilliard was a South African botanist and taxonomist. Hilliard authored 372 land plant species names, the fifth-highest number of such names authored by any female scientist. Hilliard was born in Durban on 4 July 1925. She attended Natal University from 1943 to 1947, where she obtained an MSc and later a PhD. She worked at the National Herbarium in Pretoria in 1947-48 and was a lecturer in botany at Natal University from 1954 to 1962. In 1963 she became curator of the herbarium at Natal University and a research fellow. Her special fields of interest were the flora of Natal and the...
Go to Profile#449
Junying Yuan
#59134
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Junying Yuan is the Elizabeth D. Hay Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, best known for her work in cell death. Early in her career, she contributed significant findings to the discovery and characterization of apoptosis. More recently, she was responsible for the discovery of the programmed form of necrotic cell death known as necroptosis.
Go to Profile#450
Clara Franzini-Armstrong
#42218
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Clara Franzini-Armstrong is an Italian-born American electron microscopist, and Professor Emeritus of Cell and Developmental Biology at University of Pennsylvania. Early life Clara Franzini was born on October 3, 1938, in Florence, Italy, along with her twin brother. As a child during World War II, she spent time in a hillside village. She lived with her mother, father and three brothers: Paolo, Carlo and Marco. The part of her childhood that occurred after the war consisted of competing with her brothers on exhausting mountain hikes, roller skating in Piazzale Michelangelo, observing the entire beautiful city and long relaxing times in scenic settings like the Dolomites.
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