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,
#501
Edward DeLong
#15267
Overall Influence
Edward Francis DeLong , is a marine microbiologist and professor in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and is considered a pioneer in the field of metagenomics. He is best known for his discovery of the bacterial use of the rhodopsin protein in converting sunlight to biochemical energy in marine microbial communities.
Go to Profile#502
Hector DeLuca
#19601
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Hector F. DeLuca, born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1930, is an emeritus University of Wisconsin–Madison professor and former chairman of the university's biochemistry department. DeLuca is well known for his research in involving Vitamin D, from which several pharmaceutical drugss are derived. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1979.
Go to Profile#503
Albert Neuberger
#8987
Overall Influence
1908 - 1996 (88 years)
Albert Neuberger was a British Professor of Chemical Pathology, St Mary's Hospital, 1955–1973, and later emeritus professor. Education in Germany Born in Hassfurt, northern Bavaria, the first of the three children of Max Neuberger , cloth merchant and businessman, and Bertha, née Hiller , both religious Jews. He studied medicine at the University of Würzburg where he was awarded a summa cum laude medical degree. He also took courses in chemistry there and also attended lectures given by Karl Bonhöffer, the outstanding psychiatrist and neurologist. He also worked for a while in research in Berlin where he began a lifelong friendship with Ernst Chain.
Go to Profile#504
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.
Go to Profile#505
Gerolf Steiner
#9626
Overall Influence
1908 - 2009 (101 years)
Gerolf Steiner was a German zoologist. Life and career Steiner was born in Strasbourg, Alsace in March 1908. He earned his doctorate in 1931 at the University of Heidelberg. He completed his habilitation in 1942 at the Technical University Darmstadt and 1947 at the University of Heidelberg, where he was appointed as professor in 1949. In 1962, he was an associate professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, becoming full professor in 1966 and occupying the chair of zoology from 1962 to 1973. He died five months after his 101st birthday on August 14, 2009.
Go to Profile#506
Klaus Rajewsky
#19454
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Klaus Rajewsky is a German immunologist, renowned for his work on B cells. He studied medicine in Frankfurt, Munich and at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. In 1964 he started working at the Institute of Genetics in the University of Cologne, where he became professor for genetics. He researched Hodgkin's disease and the role of B cells within the immune system. He also developed conditional knockout mice based on Cre-Lox recombination.
Go to Profile#507
Dickson Despommier
#11817
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Dickson D. Despommier is an emeritus professor of microbiology and Public Health at Columbia University. From 1971 to 2009, he conducted research on intracellular parasitism and taught courses on parasitic diseases, medical ecology and ecology. Despommier has received media coverage for his ideas on vertical farming.
Go to Profile#508
Walter Jakob Gehring
#17988
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Walter Jakob Gehring was a Swiss developmental biologist who was a professor at the Biozentrum Basel of the University of Basel, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD at the University of Zurich in 1965 and after two years as a research assistant of Ernst Hadorn he joined Alan Garen's group at Yale University in New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow.
Go to Profile#509
Eörs Szathmáry
#16207
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Eörs Szathmáry is a Hungarian theoretical evolutionary biologist at the now-defunct Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study and at the Department of Plant Taxonomy and Ecology of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He is the co-author with John Maynard Smith of The Major Transitions in Evolution, a seminal work which continues to contribute to ongoing issues in evolutionary biology. He is a member of the Batthyány Society of Professors.
Go to Profile#510
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.
Go to Profile#511
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...
Go to Profile#512
Didier Raoult
#9342
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Didier Raoult is a retired French physician and microbiologist specialising in infectious diseases. He taught about infectious diseases at the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University , and in 1984, created the Rickettsia Unit of the university. From 2008 to 2022, Raoult was the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes. He gained significant worldwide attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for vocally promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease, despite the lack of evidence for its effectiveness and the subsequent opposit...
Go to Profile#513
Aharon Razin
#11694
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Aharon Razin was an Israeli biochemist. Biography Aharon Razin was raised in Petah Tikva. He began his academic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, majoring in physics and mathematics. He completed his M.A. and PhD in biochemistry, and did post-doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology. When he returned to Israel in 1971, he served as senior lecturer, associate professor and full professor of cellular biochemistry and human genetics at the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine.
Go to Profile#514
Thomas Jessell
#8871
Overall Influence
1951 - 2019 (68 years)
Thomas Michael Jessell was the Claire Tow Professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University in New York and a prominent developmental neuroscientist. In 2018, Columbia University announced his termination from his administrative positions after an internal investigation uncovered violations of university policies. He died shortly after from a rapidly neurodegenerative condition diagnosed as progressive supranuclear palsy.
Go to Profile#515
James C. Wang
#16555
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
James C. Wang is Chinese-born American biochemist and biologist. He is a Harvard University Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. Wang was the first discoverer of topoisomerases. He was elected as an academician of the Taiwan Academia Sinica in 1982 and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#516
Anthony R. Hunter
#13320
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Anthony Rex Hunter is a British-American biologist who is a professor of biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California San Diego. His research publications list his name as Tony Hunter.
Go to Profile#517
John Tyler Bonner
#13857
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
John Tyler Bonner was an American biologist who was a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He was a pioneer in the use of cellular slime molds to understand evolution and development over a career of 40 years and was one of the world's leading experts on cellular slime moulds. Arizona State University says that the establishment and growth of developmental-evolutionary biology owes a great debt to the work of Bonner's studies. His work is highly readable and unusually clearly written and his contributions have made many complicated ideas of...
Go to Profile#518
James Grier Miller
#3152
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
James Grier Miller was an American biologist, a pioneer of systems science and academic administrator, who originated the modern use of the term "behavioral science", founded and directed the multi-disciplinary Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, and originated the living systems theory.
Go to Profile#519
Peter Gruss
#9156
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Peter Gruss is a German developmental biologist, president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and the former president of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft . Gruss's research has generally covered the topic of control mechanisms in the development of mammals, especially in the development of the nervous system. He has been able to produce insulin using stem cells.
Go to Profile#520
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.
Go to Profile#521
Richard Béliveau
#9000
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Richard Béliveau is currently the director of the Molecular Medicine Laboratory and a researcher in the Department of Neurosurgery at Notre-Dame Hospital. Additionally, he holds the Claude-Bertrand Chair in Neurosurgery at the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal.
Go to Profile#522
Robin Coombs
#13849
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Robert Royston Amos Coombs FRS FRCPath FRCP was a British immunologist, co-discoverer of the Coombs test used for detecting antibodies in various clinical scenarios, such as Rh disease and blood transfusion.
Go to Profile#523
Michael Sela
#6917
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Michael Sela was an Israeli immunologist of Polish Jewish origin. He was the W. Garfield Weston Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He was a president of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#524
Eric H. Davidson
#19016
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Eric Harris Davidson was an American developmental biologist at the California Institute of Technology. Davidson was best known for his pioneering work on the role of gene regulation in evolution, on embryonic specification and for spearheading the effort to sequence the genome of the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. He devoted a large part of his professional career to developing an understanding of embryogenesis at the genetic level. He wrote many academic works describing his work, including a textbook on early animal development.
Go to Profile#525
Gero Miesenböck
#9545
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Gero Andreas Miesenböck is an Austrian scientist. He is currently Waynflete Professor of Physiology and Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#526
Elliot Meyerowitz
#19081
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Elliot Meyerowitz is an American biologist. Career Meyerowitz did his undergraduate work at Columbia University , where he worked part-time in the laboratory of Cyrus Levinthal on combined microscopic and computational methods for tracing axons and dendritic trees in the nervous systems of fish. His graduate work was in the Department of Biology at Yale University , where he worked in the laboratory of Douglas Kankel on the interaction of eye and brain development in Drosophila, by use of genetic mosaics. From 1977 to 1979 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of David Hogness in the...
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Horace Barlow
#7438
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Horace Basil Barlow FRS was a British vision scientist. Early life Barlow was the son of the civil servant Sir Alan Barlow and his wife Lady Nora. Barlow was the great-grandson of Charles Darwin and thus part of the Darwin — Wedgwood family.
Go to Profile#528
Moslem Bahadori
#8708
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Moslem Bahadori was an Iranian medical scientist, pathologist, and a university lecturer. In 1973, Bahadori along with Averill Abraham Liebow, reported the first case of plasma cell granuloma, a benign tumor of the lung.
Go to Profile#529
Melvin Konner
#6269
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Melvin Joel Konner is an American anthropologist who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. He studied at Brooklyn College, CUNY , where he met Marjorie Shostak, whom he later married and with whom he had three children. He also has a PhD from Harvard University and a MD from Harvard Medical School .
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Erkki Ruoslahti
#19497
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Erkki Ruoslahti is a cancer researcher and distinguished professor at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. He moved from Finland to the United States in 1976. Ruoslahti made seminal contributions to biology of extracellular matrix and its receptors. He was one of the discoverers of fibronectin, an adhesion molecule and component of extracellular matrices, and he subsequently identified and cloned a number of other extracellular matrix components and adhesion molecules. In 1984, he identified the sequence within fibronectin that mediates cell attachment, called RGD for the amino...
Go to Profile#531
Sam Harris
#1440
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and is known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
Go to Profile#532
Lucy Shapiro
#14772
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Lucy Shapiro is an American developmental biologist. She is a professor of Developmental Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and the director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine.
Go to Profile#533
Ray Wu
#10778
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Ray Jui Wu was a Chinese-born American geneticist and served as Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Molecular Genetics and Biology at Cornell University. In 1970, Wu created the first approach for DNA sequencing, earlier than the Frederick Sanger's method in 1975 and Walter Gilbert's chemical procedure in 1977. Wu's contributions on DNA sequencing are fundamental to the general sequencing methods today.
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Rakesh Jain
#8533
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Rakesh K. Jain is the Andrew Werk Cook Professor of Tumor Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Harvard Medical School and director of the E.L. Steele Laboratories for Tumor Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Go to Profile#535
Gottfried Schatz
#13185
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Gottfried Schatz was a Swiss-Austrian biochemist. Life and career Schatz was born in Strem. Upon obtaining his PhD in chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Graz , he did postdoctoral work at the University of Vienna and at "The Public Health Institute" of the City of New York. In 1968, he emigrated to the US in order to assume a professorship Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Six years later, he returned to Europe in order to join the newly created Biozentrum at the University of Basel, which he chaired from 1983 to 1985, From 1984 to 1989 he was Secretary General of the European Molecular Biology Organization .
Go to Profile#536
André Michel Lwoff
#6338
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
André Michel Lwoff was a French microbiologist and Nobel laureate of Russian-Polish origin. Education, early life and career Lwoff was born in Ainay-le-Château, Allier, in Auvergne, France, into a Jewish family, the son of Marie , an artist, and Solomon Lwoff, a psychiatrist. He joined the Institute Pasteur in Paris when he was 19 years old. In 1932, he finished his PhD and, with the help of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, moved with his wife and co-researcher Marguerite Lwoff to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research of Heidelberg to Otto Meyerhof, where he did research on the development of flagellates.
Go to Profile#537
Donald Caspar
#5726
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Donald L. D. Caspar was an American structural biologist known for his works on the structures of biological molecules, particularly of the tobacco mosaic virus. He was an emeritus professor of biological science at the Institute of Molecular Biophysics, Florida State University, and an emeritus professor of biology at the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University. He has made significant scientific contributions in virus biology, X-ray, neutron and electron diffraction, and protein plasticity.
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Ralph L. Brinster
#9600
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Ralph Lawrence Brinster is an American geneticist, National Medal of Science laureate, and Richard King Mellon Professor of Reproductive Physiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#539
Uri Alon
#10759
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Uri Alon is a Professor and Systems Biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His highly cited research investigates gene expression, network motifs and the design principles of biological networks in Escherichia coli and other organisms using both computational biology and traditional experimental wet laboratory techniques.
Go to Profile#540
Ilan Chet
#10495
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Ilan Chet is an Israeli microbiologist and a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot. He was appointed Deputy Secretary General of the Union of the Mediterranean in 2010 with responsibility for its Higher Education and Research Division In 2000 he was nominated for the position of President of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#541
Henry Markram
#4164
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Henry John Markram is a South African-born Israeli neuroscientist, professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and director of the Blue Brain Project and founder of the Human Brain Project.
Go to Profile#542
Heinz Sielmann
#10846
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Heinz Sielmann was a German wildlife photographer, biologist, zoologist and documentary filmmaker. Early life Heinz's father was physician Paul Sielmann. His first film, in 1938, was a silent movie on bird life in East Prussia and the Memelland. Further work was interrupted by World War II. He was initially stationed in occupied Poland in Poznań , as an instructor at a radio-communications training unit of the Luftwaffe. Sielmann gained a degree in biology and specialized in zoology, in 1940, at the University of Posen, at that time a Germanized university. There he met Joseph Beuys, who was his trainee, and they both attended lectures in biology and zoology.
Go to Profile#543
Lisa Feldman Barrett
#3332
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#544
Miguel Altieri
#11620
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Miguel Altieri is a Chilean born agronomist and entomologist. He is a Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
Go to Profile#545
Joan Massagué
#13156
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Joan Massagué , is a Spanish biologist and the current director of the Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is also an internationally recognized leader in the study of both cancer metastasis and growth factors that regulate cell behavior, as well as a professor at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
Go to Profile#546
Aviv Regev
#15555
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Aviv Regev is a computational biologist and systems biologist and Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development in Genentech/Roche. She is a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regev is a pioneer of single cell genomics and of computational and systems biology of gene regulatory circuits. She founded and leads the Human Cell Atlas project, together with Sarah Teichmann.
Go to Profile#547
Nahum Sonenberg
#12334
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Nahum Sonenberg, is an Israeli Canadian microbiologist and biochemist. He is a James McGill professor of biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was an HHMI international research scholar from 1997 to 2011 and is now a senior international research scholar. He is best known for his seminal contributions to our understanding of translation, and notable for the discovery of the mRNA 5' cap-binding protein, eIF4E, the rate-limiting component of the eukaryotic translation apparatus.
Go to Profile#548
Takashi Gojobori
#12745
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
is a Japanese molecular biologist, Vice-Director of the National Institute of Genetics and the DNA Data Bank of Japan at NIG, in Mishima, Japan. Gojobori is a Distinguished Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. He is a Professor of Bioscience and Acting Director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center at KAUST.
Go to Profile#549
Ian Frazer
#5575
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ian Hector Frazer is a Scottish-born Australian immunologist, the founding CEO and Director of Research of the Translational Research Institute . Frazer and Jian Zhou developed and patented the basic technology behind the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer at the University of Queensland. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute, Georgetown University, and University of Rochester also contributed to the further development of the cervical cancer vaccine in parallel.
Go to Profile#550
Michael Dirr
#16420
Overall Influence
Michael A. Dirr is an American horticulturist and a professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia. He is an expert on woody plants. Education and experience Dirr earned a Bachelors in Science degree in Plant Physiology and a Masters in Science degree in Plant Physiology from Ohio State University and a Ph.D in Plant Physiology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in 1972. Upon graduation from the University of Massachusetts, Dirr was an Assistant Professor of Ornamental Horticulture at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where he continued to work until 1978. He then became a Mercer Fellow at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University through 1979.
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