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 people in Biology,
#51
Niles Eldredge
#823
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Niles Eldredge is a biologist and paleontologist. He studied Latin and geology as an undergraduate before earning a PhD at Columbia University. His career and research have been devoted to the exploration of paleontology and evolutionary theory. As curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Invertebrates, and later, Invertebrate Paleontology, he specialized in the study of the evolution of Phacopida trilobites, which went extinct roughly 245 million years ago. A critic of the more common, gene-centered, view of evolution, he ...
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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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Severo Ochoa
#751
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Severo Ochoa de Albornoz was a Spanish physician and biochemist, and winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Arthur Kornberg for their discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid ".
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H. Robert Horvitz
#1697
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
H. Robert Horvitz is a professor of biology and member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Science & the Public, and a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s Advisory Board. He studied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Horvitz is best known for his work researching the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
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Oliver H. Lowry
#2212
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Oliver Howe Lowry was an American biochemist. He devised the Lowry protein assay, the subject of the most-cited scientific paper in history. Biography Lowry was the youngest of a family of five children. His father was a teacher and later an administrator in the Chicago public school system. His three brothers and sister all earned graduate degrees in various fields, and Lowry was inspired to emulate his siblings. He attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for his undergraduate studies, having intended to major in chemical engineering. However, upon the advice of a fellow student, he ended up shifting his focus towards biochemistry.
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James Rothman
#1415
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
James Edward Rothman is an American biochemist. He is the Fergus F. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Yale University, the Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine, and the Director of the Nanobiology Institute at the Yale West Campus. Rothman also concurrently serves as adjunct professor of physiology and cellular biophysics at Columbia University and a research professor at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London.
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Robert Trivers
#517
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Ludlow "Bob" Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist. Trivers proposed the theories of reciprocal altruism , parental investment , facultative sex ratio determination , and parent–offspring conflict . He has also contributed by explaining self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy and discussing intragenomic conflict.
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Paul R. Ehrlich
#261
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Paul Ralph Ehrlich is an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University, and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.
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Thomas C. Südhof
#1525
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Thomas Christian Südhof , ForMemRS, is a German-American biochemist known for his study of synaptic transmission. Currently, he is a professor in the school of medicine in the department of molecular and cellular physiology, and by courtesy in neurology, and in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
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Garrett Hardin
#359
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Garrett James Hardin was an American ecologist. He focused his career on the issue of human overpopulation, and is best known for his exposition of the tragedy of the commons in a 1968 paper of the same title in Science, which called attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment". He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: "We can never do merely one thing. Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects, many of which are unpredictable." Garrett held hardline anti-immigrant positions as well as positions on eugenics and multiethnicism that have led multiple sources to label him a white nationalist.
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Andrew Fire
#1983
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Andrew Zachary Fire is an American biologist and professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Craig C. Mello, for the discovery of RNA interference . This research was conducted at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and published in 1998.
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Daniel Nathans
#1590
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Daniel Nathans was an American microbiologist. He shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application in restriction mapping. Early life and education Nathans was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the last of nine children born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Sarah and Samuel Nathans. During the Great Depression his father lost his small business and was unemployed for a long time.
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Humberto Maturana
#192
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Humberto Maturana Romesín was a Chilean biologist and philosopher. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün and Ernst von Glasersfeld, but in fact he was biologist, scientist.
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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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Torsten Wiesel
#540
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Torsten Nils Wiesel is a Swedish neurophysiologist. With David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres.
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Eugene Koonin
#3570
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Eugene Viktorovich Koonin is a Russian-American biologist and Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information . He is a recognised expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology.
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Svante Pääbo
#1078
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Svante Pääbo is the director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and an expert in the field of evolutionary genetics. He earned his Ph.D. from Uppsala University. Among the founders of the field of paleogenetics, Pääbo has conducted significant research into early human genetics and has successfully sequenced Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA from a sample found in modern-day Germany. In 2009, he and his colleagues announced that they had completed their first attempt at a complete mapping of the Neanderthal genome. This discovery was followed i...
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Christian de Duve
#1325
Overall Influence
1917 - 2013 (96 years)
Christian René Marie Joseph, Viscount de Duve was a Nobel Prize-winning Belgian cytologist and biochemist. He made serendipitous discoveries of two cell organelles, peroxisome and lysosome, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Albert Claude and George E. Palade . In addition to peroxisome and lysosome, he invented scientific names such as autophagy, endocytosis, and exocytosis in a single occasion.
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Martin Evans
#1260
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sir Martin John Evans FLSW is an English biologist who, with Matthew Kaufman, was the first to culture mice embryonic stem cells and cultivate them in a laboratory in 1981. He is also known, along with Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, for his work in the development of the knockout mouse and the related technology of gene targeting, a method of using embryonic stem cells to create specific gene modifications in mice. In 2007, the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of their discovery and contribution to the efforts to develop new treatments for illnesses ...
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Richard J. Roberts
#1826
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir Richard John Roberts is a British biochemist and molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Allen Sharp for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing. He currently works at New England Biolabs.
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César Milstein
#1279
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
César Milstein, CH, FRS was an Argentine biochemist in the field of antibody research. Milstein shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Niels Kaj Jerne and Georges J. F. Köhler for developing the hybridoma technique for the production of monoclonal antibodies.
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Melvin Calvin
#678
Overall Influence
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Melvin Ellis Calvin was an American biochemist known for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Seymour Benzer
#2772
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Seymour Benzer was an American physicist, molecular biologist and behavioral geneticist. His career began during the molecular biology revolution of the 1950s, and he eventually rose to prominence in the fields of molecular and behavioral genetics. He led a productive genetics research lab both at Purdue University and as the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology.
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Richard Axel
#1528
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Richard Axel is an American molecular biologist and university professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His work on the olfactory system won him and Linda Buck, a former postdoctoral research scientist in his group, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004.
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Harald zur Hausen
#848
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Harald zur Hausen NAS EASA APS was a German virologist. He carried out research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008. He was chairman of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
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Maclyn McCarty
#2174
Overall Influence
1911 - 2005 (94 years)
Maclyn McCarty was an American geneticist, a research scientist described in 2005 as "the last surviving member of a Manhattan scientific team that overturned medical dogma in the 1940s and became the first to demonstrate that genes were made of DNA." He had worked at Rockefeller University "for more than 60 years." 1994 marked 50 years since this work's release.
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Rudolf Jaenisch
#2257
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Rudolf Jaenisch is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his M.D. from the University of Munich, where he specializes in transgenic science, which genetically modifies animals such as mice to study human diseases such as cancer. He completed his postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute, where he studied bacteriophages. His laboratory has made breakthroughs that have improved therapies for sickle-cell anemia and Parkinson’s Disease. Jaenisch has been a vocal advocate for using transgenic methods to alter human cells, but he is opposed to human reproductive cloning.
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Bert Sakmann
#1122
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Bert Sakmann is a German cell physiologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Erwin Neher in 1991 for their work on "the function of single ion channels in cells," and the invention of the patch clamp. Bert Sakmann was Professor at Heidelberg University and is an Emeritus Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. Since 2008 he leads an emeritus research group at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
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Donald A. Glaser
#1214
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Donald Arthur Glaser was an American physicist, neurobiologist, and the winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber used in subatomic particle physics. Education Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Glaser completed his Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics from Case School of Applied Science in 1946. He completed his PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1949. Glaser accepted a position as an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1949, and was promoted to professor in 1957. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, in 1959, as a professor of physics.
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John Kendrew
#1426
Overall Influence
1917 - 1997 (80 years)
Sir John Cowdery Kendrew, was an English biochemist, crystallographer, and science administrator. Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Max Perutz, for their work at the Cavendish Laboratory to investigate the structure of haem-containing proteins.
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Oliver Sacks
#202
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
Oliver Wolf Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. Born in London, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles . Later, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades.
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Francis Collins
#698
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He served as director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents.
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Joseph L. Goldstein
#1941
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Joseph Leonard Goldstein ForMemRS is an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas Southwestern researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood and that when LDL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesterolemia and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases, notably coronary heart disease. Their studies led to the development of statin dru...
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Paul Nurse
#1203
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sir Paul Maxime Nurse is an English geneticist, former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Leland Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle.
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Steven Rose
#926
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Steven Peter Russell Rose is an English neuroscientist, author, and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of biology and neurobiology at the Open University and Gresham College, London. Early life Born in London, United Kingdom, he was brought up as an Orthodox Jew. Rose says that he decided to become an atheist when he was eight years old. He went to a direct grant school in northwest London which operated a numerus clausus restricting the numbers of Jewish students. He studied biochemistry at King's College, Cambridge, and neurochemistry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's Coll...
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Günter Blobel
#1492
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Günter Blobel was a Silesian German and American biologist and 1999 Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.
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Phillip Allen Sharp
#2221
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence". He has been selected to receive the 2015 Othmer Gold Medal.
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Arieh Warshel
#734
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Arieh Warshel is an Israeli-American biochemist and biophysicist. He is a pioneer in computational studies on functional properties of biological molecules, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and holds the Dana and David Dornsife Chair in Chemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
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Stanley Norman Cohen
#1698
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Stanley Norman Cohen is an American geneticist and the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetical engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine. According to immunologist Hugh McDevitt, "Cohen's DNA cloning technology has helped biologists in virtually every field". Without it, "the face of biomedicine and biotechnology woul...
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Walter Fiers
#3099
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Walter Fiers was a Belgian molecular biologist. He obtained a degree of Engineer for Chemistry and Agricultural Industries at the University of Ghent in 1954, and started his research career as an enzymologist in the laboratory of Laurent Vandendriessche in Ghent. In 1956–57, he worked with in Copenhagen . In 1960, he obtained a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and joined the group of Bob Sinsheimer as a postdoc. At the California Institute of Technology Walter Fiers was exposed to Molecular Biology, which was then just developing, studying viral DNA. He demonstrated the physical, covalently closed circularity of Bacteriophage PhiX-174 DNA.
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Gerald Edelman
#511
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Gerald Maurice Edelman was an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and...
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Leonard Hayflick
#2349
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Leonard Hayflick is a Professor of Anatomy at the UCSF School of Medicine, and was Professor of Medical Microbiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a past president of the Gerontological Society of America and was a founding member of the council of the National Institute on Aging . The recipient of a number of research prizes and awards, including the 1991 Sandoz Prize for Gerontological Research, he has studied the aging process for more than fifty years. He is known for discovering that normal human cells divide for a limited number of times in vitro . This is known as the Hayflick limit.
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James P. Allison
#1771
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James Patrick Allison is an American immunologist and Nobel laureate who holds the position of professor and chair of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.
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Edwin Southern
#3242
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sir Edwin Mellor Southern is an English Lasker Award-winning molecular biologist, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He is most widely known for the invention of the Southern blot, published in 1975 and now a common laboratory procedure.
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Gregory S. Paul
#1418
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gregory Scott Paul is an American freelance researcher, author and illustrator who works in paleontology. He is best known for his work and research on theropod dinosaurs and his detailed illustrations, both live and skeletal. Professionally investigating and restoring dinosaurs for three decades, Paul received an on-screen credit as dinosaur specialist on Jurassic Park and Discovery Channel's When Dinosaurs Roamed America and Dinosaur Planet. He is the author and illustrator of Predatory Dinosaurs of the World , The Complete Illustrated Guide to Dinosaur Skeletons , Dinosaurs of the Air , The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs , Gregory S.
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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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Werner Arber
#1739
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology Werner Arber is a geneticist and microbiologist. He studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Geneva. His doctorate was completed at the University of Geneva, where he studied electron microscopy and lambda bacteriophages. Arber has worked with students, scientists and researchers at the University of Southern California, the University of Geneva, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Basel. He was among the first to work in the University of Basel’s new interdisciplinary research center, the Biozentrum.
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Rodolfo Llinás
#1637
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Rodolfo Llinás Riascos is a Colombian and American neuroscientist. He is currently the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine. Llinás has published over 800 scientific articles.
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Anthony Fauci
#196
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Anthony Stephen Fauci is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022. Fauci was one of the world's most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals from 1983 to 2002. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for his work on the AIDS relief program PEPFAR.
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David H. Hubel
#632
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
David Hunter Hubel was an American Canadian neurophysiologist noted for his studies of the structure and function of the visual cortex. He was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine , for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system. For much of his career, Hubel worked as the Professor of Neurobiology at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Medical School. In 1978, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. In 1983, Hubel received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy...
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