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,
#1
Elizabeth Blackburn
#488
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elizabeth Blackburn is a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, studying the impacts of stress on telomerase and telomeres. She is the former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the first Australian woman to win a Nobel prize. She earned a bachelor of science and a master of science from the University of Melbourne. She went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She is best known for her co-discovery of the telomerase, which is the enzyme that replenishes telomere. She and colleagues Carol W. Greider and Jack Szostak were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for this work.
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Barbara McClintock
#416
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Barbara McClintock was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader of the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was...
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Carol W. Greider
#1125
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Carolyn Widney Greider is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Distinguished Professor in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology in October 2020.
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Emmanuelle Charpentier
#555
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology, Genetics Emmanuelle Charpentier is the Founding and Acting Director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens and an Honorary Professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, which is now known as the Faculty of Science at Sorbonne University. She went on to earn a research doctorate from the Institut Pasteur. Charpentier is well known for her collaboration with Jennifer Doudna on decoding the molecular mechanisms of the CRISPR/Cas9 bacterial immune system. Her work on CRISPR has enabled scientists to edit the genome using Cas9.
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Jennifer Doudna
#727
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Areas of Specialization: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology Jennifer Doudna is a Li Ka Shing Chancellor Chair Professor for the Department of Chemistry and Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, she has been a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes. She earned a B.A. in biochemistry from Pomona College and a Ph.D. in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School. She is best known for her work with CRISPR.
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Lynn Margulis
#883
Overall Influence
1938 - 2011 (73 years)
Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria.
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Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
#1179
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is a German developmental biologist and a 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate. She is the only woman from Germany to have received a Nobel Prize in the sciences.
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Esther Lederberg
#3143
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg was an American microbiologist and a pioneer of bacterial genetics. She discovered the bacterial virus λ and the bacterial fertility factor F, devised the first implementation of replica plating, and furthered the understanding of the transfer of genes between bacteria by specialized transduction.
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Linda B. Buck
#2193
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Brown Buck is an American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system. She was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Richard Axel, for their work on olfactory receptors. She is currently on the faculty of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
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Margarita Salas
#3019
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Margarita Salas Falgueras, 1st Marchioness of Canero was a Spanish scientist, medical researcher, and author in the fields of biochemistry and molecular genetics. She started developing molecular biology in Spain and also worked as an honorary associate professor of CSIC, at the Severo Ochoa Biology Center . In 2016 she became the first women ever to receive the Echegaray Medal, that was given to her by the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences .
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Elaine Ingham
#6781
Overall Influence
Elaine Ingham is an American microbiologist and soil biology researcher and founder of Soil Foodweb Inc. She is known as a leader in soil microbiology and research of the soil food web, She is an author of the USDA's Soil Biology Primer.
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Mary Higby Schweitzer
#4105
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mary Higby Schweitzer is an American paleontologist at North Carolina State University, who led the groups that discovered the remains of blood cells in dinosaur fossils and later discovered soft tissue remains in the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen MOR 1125, as well as evidence that the specimen was a pregnant female when she died.
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Martha Chase
#5393
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Martha Cowles Chase , also known as Martha C. Epstein, was an American geneticist who in 1952, with Alfred Hershey, experimentally helped to confirm that DNA rather than protein is the genetic material of life.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
#4594
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Native American botanist, author, an American Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology; and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry .
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May-Britt Moser
#2670
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
May-Britt Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . She and her former husband, Edvard Moser, shared half of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for work concerning the grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, as well as several additional space-representing cell types in the same circuit that make up the positioning system in the brain. Together with Edvard Moser she established the Moser research environment at NTNU, which they lead. Since 2012 she has he...
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Elisabeth Lloyd
#2767
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Elisabeth Anne Lloyd is an American philosopher of science specialising in the philosophy of biology. She is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine - as well as Adjunct Professor of biology - at Indiana University, Bloomington, affiliated faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.
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Katalin Karikó
#2773
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Katalin "Kati" Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist who specializes in ribonucleic acid -mediated mechanisms, particularly in vitro-transcribed messenger RNA for protein replacement therapy. Karikó laid the scientific groundwork for mRNA vaccines, overcoming major obstacles and skepticism in the scientific community. Karikó received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for her work, along with American immunologist Drew Weissman.
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Tomoko Ohta
#7816
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
is a Japanese scientist and Professor Emeritus of the National Institute of Genetics. Ohta works on population genetics/molecular evolution and is known for developing the nearly neutral theory of evolution.
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Brenda Milner
#1626
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (106 years)
Brenda Milner is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. , she holds more than 25 honorary degrees and she continued to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as the founder of neuropsychology and has been essential in its development.
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Paulien Hogeweg
#6614
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Paulien Hogeweg is a Dutch theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher studying biological systems as dynamic information processing systems at many interconnected levels. In 1970, together with Ben Hesper, she defined the term bioinformatics as "the study of informatic processes in biotic systems".
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Alice S. Huang
#6526
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Alice S. Huang Early years Alice Huang's father, Quentin K. Y. Huang, was orphaned at age 12 in Anhui, China and was taken in by a missionary. He was later educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Divinity School, returning to China as an Anglican bishop. He later married Huang's mother, Grace Betty Soong.
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Cornelia Bargmann
#7759
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Cornelia Isabella "Cori" Bargmann is an American neurobiologist. She is known for her work on the genetic and neural circuit mechanisms of behavior using C. elegans, particularly the mechanisms of olfaction in the worm. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and had been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016. She was the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from 2016 to 2022. In 2012 she was awarded the $1 million Kavli Prize, and in 2013 the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
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Patricia Jacobs
#5455
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Patricia Ann Jacobs OBE FRSE FRS FMedSci FRCPath is a Scottish geneticist and is Honorary Professor of Human Genetics, Co-director of Research, Wessex Regional Genetics Laboratory, within the University of Southampton.
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Eugenie Clark
#7108
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Eugenie Clark , popularly known as The Shark Lady, was an American ichthyologist known for both her research on shark behavior and her study of fish in the order Tetraodontiformes. Clark was a pioneer in the field of scuba diving for research purposes. In addition to being regarded as an authority in marine biology, Clark was popularly recognized and used her fame to promote marine conservation.
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Anne McLaren
#7286
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Dame Anne Laura Dorinthea McLaren, was a British scientist who was a leading figure in developmental biology. She paved the way for women in science and her work helped lead to human in vitro fertilisation . She left an enduring legacy marked by her research and ethical contributions to the field. She received many honors for her contributions to science, including election as fellow of the Royal Society.
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Ruth Fowler Edwards
#7183
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Ruth Fowler Edwards, Lady Edwards was a British geneticist and the long-time wife and collaborator of Robert G. Edwards, the "father" of in vitro fertilization. Life Ruth was descended from a line of distinguished scientists. According to Martin Johnson, She was the granddaughter of Ernest Rutherford, who himself won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1908, ‘for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances’ . Her father was Sir Ralph Fowler FRS , who was Plummer Professor of Mathematical Physics in Cambridge from 1932 to 1944.Her mothe...
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Elena Conti
#10293
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Elena Conti is an Italian biochemist and molecular biologist. She serves as Director and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, where she uses structural biology and biophysical techniques to study RNA transport and RNA metabolism. Together with Elisa Izaurralde, she helped characterize proteins important for exporting mRNA out of the nucleus.
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Rita R. Colwell
#7104
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Rita Rossi Colwell is an American environmental microbiologist and scientific administrator. Colwell holds degrees in bacteriology, genetics, and oceanography and studies infectious diseases. Colwell is the founder and Chair of CosmosID, a bioinformatics company. From 1998 to 2004, she was the 11th Director and 1st female Director of the National Science Foundation. She has served on the board of directors of EcoHealth Alliance since 2012.
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Gertrude B. Elion
#2999
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design for the development of new drugs. This new method focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error. Her work led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Her well known works also include the development of the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used t...
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Maxine Singer
#9205
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Maxine Frank Singer is an American molecular biologist and science administrator. She is known for her contributions to solving the genetic code, her role in the ethical and regulatory debates on recombinant DNA techniques , and her leadership of Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
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Antje Boetius
#13153
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Antje Boetius is a German marine biologist. She is a professor of geomicrobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, University of Bremen. Boetius received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in March 2009 for her study of sea bed microorganisms that affect the global climate. She is also the director of Germany's polar research hub, the Alfred Wegener Institute.
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Candace Pert
#6519
Overall Influence
1946 - 2013 (67 years)
Candace Beebe Pert was an American neuroscientist and pharmacologist who discovered the opioid receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain. Early life and education She was born on June 26, 1946, in Manhattan, New York City.
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Brenda Schulman
#11241
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Brenda Schulman is an American biochemist and structural biologist who is a Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried, Bavaria. Schulman's research interests focus on a class of proteins known as ubiquitin-like proteins.
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Susan Lindquist
#9122
Overall Influence
1949 - 2016 (67 years)
Susan Lee Lindquist, ForMemRS was an American professor of biology at MIT specializing in molecular biology, particularly the protein folding problem within a family of molecules known as heat-shock proteins, and prions. Lindquist was a member and former director of the Whitehead Institute and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010.
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Cynthia Kenyon
#9351
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cynthia Jane Kenyon is an American molecular biologist and biogerontologist known for her genetic dissection of aging in a widely used model organism, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. She is the vice president of aging research at Calico Research Labs, and emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco .
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Li-Meng Yan
#6262
Overall Influence
Li-Meng Yan or Yan Limeng is a Chinese virologist, known for her publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. Her publications have been widely dismissed as flawed by the scientific community.
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Eva Klein
#14443
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Eva Klein is a Hungarian-Swedish scientist. Klein has worked at the Karolinska Institute since leaving Hungary in 1947. She is regarded as a founder of cancer immunology. Her life and career choices as a young Jewish woman were constrained by discrimination, and she survived the late stages of German occupation in hiding. A medical doctor with a PhD in biology, she has worked in cancer immunology and virology.
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Elaine Fuchs
#10123
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Elaine V. Fuchs is an American cell biologist famous for her work on the biology and molecular mechanisms of mammalian skin and skin diseases, who helped lead the modernization of dermatology. Fuchs pioneered reverse genetics approaches, which assess protein function first and then assess its role in development and disease. In particular, Fuchs researches skin stem cells and their production of hair and skin. She is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development at The Rockefeller University.
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Marilyn Farquhar
#12968
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Marilyn Gist Farquhar was a pathologist and cellular biologist, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Pathology, as well as the chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, who previously worked at Yale University from 1973 to 1990. She has won the E. B. Wilson Medal and the FASEB Excellence in Science Award. She was married to Nobel Laureate George Emil Palade from 1970 to his death in 2008. Her research focuses on control of intracellular membrane traffic and the molecular pathogenesis of auto immune kidney diseases.
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Mary F. Lyon
#10331
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Mary Frances Lyon was an English geneticist best known for her discovery of X-chromosome inactivation, an important biological phenomenon. Early life and education Mary Lyon was born on 15 May 1925 in Norwich, England as the eldest out of three children of a civil servant and a schoolteacher. She was educated at a grammar school in Birmingham. During that time, she said, she became interested in science thanks to a good schoolteacher and nature books she won in an essay competition. During the Second World War in 1943, she began her studies at Girton College, Cambridge at the University of ...
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Joan A. Steitz
#13673
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins , which occur in eukaryotes. In September 2018, Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The Lasker award is often referred to as the 'American Nobel' because 87...
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Ruth Arnon
#8663
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ruth Arnon is an Israeli biochemist and codeveloper of the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone. She is currently the Paul Ehrlich Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she is researching anti-cancer and influenza vaccinations.
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Temple Grandin
#1732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mary Temple Grandin is an American academic and animal behaviorist. She is a prominent proponent for the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter and the author of more than 60 scientific papers on animal behavior. Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry, where she offers advice on animal behavior, and is also an autism spokesperson.
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Heather Heying
#10026
Overall Influence
Heather E. Heying is an American evolutionary biologist, former professor, and author, who came to national attention following the Evergreen State College protests in 2017. She has been associated with the informal group known as the intellectual dark web and testified at the US Department of Justice forum on Free Speech on College Campuses in 2018. Heying opposed COVID-19 vaccines and promoted the discredited belief that the drug ivermectin is effective in treating the disease.
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Suzanne Eaton
#20280
Overall Influence
1959 - 2019 (60 years)
Suzanne Eaton was an American scientist and professor of molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. Early life and education Eaton was born on December 23, 1959, in Oakland, California. One of Eaton's self-confessed role models as a child was Spock, due to his rational approach to problem solving. She was also a talented pianist, having played since the age of eight.
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Nicole Marthe Le Douarin
#15740
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Nicole Marthe Le Douarin is a developmental biologist known for her studies of chimeras, which have led to critical insights regarding higher animal nervous and immune systems. Le Douarin invented an embryo manipulation technology to produce chimeric embryos, from chicken and quails. Her research has shed light on the development of higher animal nervous and immune systems. She showed that precursor cells within the neural crest were multipotent. Her technique has also permitted her to shed light on the development of the blood and immune systems. Her work on antero-posterior patterning of th...
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Sandra Ciesek
#9633
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Sandra Ciesek is a German physician and virologist. She is the director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the Universitätsklinikum Frankfurt and professor of medical virology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Her main areas of research include new forms of therapy for hepatitis C and, more recently, the search for drugs against COVID-19.
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Birutė Galdikas
#3216
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Birutė Marija Filomena Galdikas or Birutė Mary Galdikas, OC , is a Lithuanian-Canadian anthropologist, primatologist, conservationist, ethologist, and author. She is a professor at Simon Fraser University. In the field of primatology, Galdikas is recognized as a leading authority on orangutans. Prior to her field study of orangutans, scientists knew little about the species.
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Fiona Watt
#16437
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Fiona Watt, is a British scientist who is internationally known for her contributions to the field of stem cell biology. In the 1980s, when the field was in its infancy, she highlighted key characteristics of stem cells and their environment that laid the foundation for much present day research. She is currently director of the Centre for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine at King's College London, and Executive Chair of the Medical Research Council , the first woman to lead the MRC since its foundation in 1913. On 13 July 2021 she was appointed as the new Director of the European Molecula...
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Lierre Keith
#15089
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lierre Keith is an American writer, radical feminist, food activist, and radical environmentalist. Biography Keith attended Brookline High School in Massachusetts. She began her public involvement in the feminist movement as the founding editor of Vanessa and Iris: A Journal for Young Feminists . During this same period, she also volunteered with a group called Women Against Violence Against Women in Cambridge, where she participated in educational events and protest campaigns. In 1984, she was a founding member of Minor Disturbance, a protest group against militarism from a feminist perspective.
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