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 people in Biology,
#5051
Vanda Alice Lennon
#101043
Overall Influence
#5052
Thomas ap Rees
#97406
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Thomas ap Rees was a botanist. He was Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge between 1991 and 1996 when he has killed in a road accident whilst cycling home.
Go to Profile#5053
Andrea Ablasser
#65051
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Andrea Ablasser is a German immunologist, who works as a full professor of Life Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Her research has focused on how the innate immune system is able to recognise virus-infected cells and pathogens.
Go to Profile#5054
Jennie Pryce
#85688
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Professor Jennie Elizabeth Pryce is a quantitative geneticist based in Melbourne, Australia. Jennie is the DairyBio animal program leader in conjunction with her role as principal research scientist for Agriculture Victoria and Professor of animal genetics at La Trobe University.
Go to Profile#5055
Michel Bouvier
#80448
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michel Bouvier is a Canadian biochemist and molecular pharmacologist. He is a professor of biochemistry and molecular medicine at Université de Montréal; a principal investigator and the chief executive officer at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer; and an associate vice-president in Research, Scientific Discovery, Creation, and Innovation at Université de Montréal. His work focuses on the study of cell signaling towards the discovery of new pharmaceutical drugs.
Go to Profile#5056
Zakaria Erzinçlioğlu
#78309
Overall Influence
1951 - 2002 (51 years)
Zakaria Erzinçlioğlu , also known as Dr Zak, was a British forensic entomologist. He used his expertise in insect biology in criminal investigations and solved more than 200 murders, earning him an international reputation.
Go to Profile#5057
Mario Maj
#101094
Overall Influence
#5058
Per Artur Peterson
#101098
Overall Influence
#5059
J. Helms Jørgensen
#101100
Overall Influence
#5060
Tolu Olukayode Odugbemi
#47150
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Tolu Olukayode Odugbemi is a Nigerian professor of Medical Microbiology, educational administrator and former vice chancellor of the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He was the 9th vice chancellor of the University of Lagos.
Go to Profile#5061
Michael P. Doyle
#94322
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Michael Patrick Doyle is an microbiologist. He is an emeritus Regents Professor of Food Microbiology at the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and the former director of the college's Center for Food Safety, where he researched foodborne bacterial pathogens. Doyle was the first food microbiologist to study E. coli. He developed patents for several food safety interventions, including one used as a meat wash.
Go to Profile#5062
Mitchell Kronenberg
#100447
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mitchell Kronenberg is an American immunologist and the chief scientific officer at La Jolla Institute for Immunology. He served as president of the institute from 2003 to 2021. Education Kronenberg received his Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University in 1973 and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, where he stayed on to complete postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Leroy Hood.
Go to Profile#5063
Gerard Muyzer
#101143
Overall Influence
#5064
Mariko Hasegawa
#54782
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mariko Hiraiwa Hasegawa is a zoologist and anthropologist who studies behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and physical anthropology. Hasegawa is president of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. She is "among the rare Japanese women primatologists to have gained international recognition."
Go to Profile#5065
Bernice Giduz Schubert
#85092
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Bernice Giduz Schubert was an American botanist. Her academic career developed over 53 years as a professor and herbarium curator with Harvard University. She made many collection trips in Mexico and the United States.
Go to Profile#5066
Frank Odds
#93565
Overall Influence
Frank C. Odds was an English mycologist. He studied Candida albicans, establishing how modern researchers study fungal pathogens and the diseases they cause. Early life and education Frank C. Odds was born in Devon, England on August 29, 1945. He studied biochemistry and obtained his undergraduate degree and PhD at the University of Leeds. From 1970 to 1972, Odds was a visiting Fellow at the Center for Disease Control . Returning to the United Kingdom in 1972, Odds accepted a postdoctoral fellowship position back at the University of Leeds until 1975. Odds experienced his first faculty role at the University of Leicester as a lecturer and senior lecture in Medical Microbiology until 1989.
Go to Profile#5067
Ronald J. Gibbons
#101157
Overall Influence
#5068
Michael P. Alexander
#101160
Overall Influence
#5069
Cynthia C. Morton
#84063
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Cynthia Casson Morton is an American geneticist, professor at Harvard Medical School, and director of cytogenetics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Biography Morton graduated in 1973 from Maryland's Easton High School and in 1977 from the College of William and Mary with a bachelor's degree in biology. In 1982 she received her Ph.D. in human genetics from the Medical College of Virginia.
Go to Profile#5070
David James
#39542
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Ernest James is a cell biologist who discovered the glucose transporter GLUT4. He has also been responsible for the molecular dissection of the intracellular trafficking pathways that regulate GLUT4 translocation to the cell surface, the topological mapping of the insulin signal transduction pathway, the creation of a method for studying in vivo metabolism in small animals, and the use of this method to gain insights into whole-animal fuel metabolism and homeostasis.
Go to Profile#5071
Frederick R. Maxfield
#101187
Overall Influence
#5072
Harmohinder Singh Gill
#86025
Overall Influence
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Dr. Harmohinder Singh Gill was an American and Indian scientist, and served 35 years as a renowned plant pathologist and nematologist for the Riverside County Agricultural Commissioner's Office in the state of California under the direction of Robert M. Howie. George A. Zentmyer, professor and chairman in the plant pathology department at the University of California, Riverside, arranged for Gill to be appointed adjunct professor, with his own laboratory at the campus from 1968 to the early 1980s. Working with Zentmyer, Gill continued his work on elucidating the genus phytophthora by disc el...
Go to Profile#5073
Arthur I. Cederbaum
#101223
Overall Influence
#5074
Humphry Greenwood
#84898
Overall Influence
1927 - 1995 (68 years)
Peter Humphry Greenwood FRS FIBiol was an English ichthyologist. Humphry married fellow student Marjorie George in 1950. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985. He was known for his work on the species flocks of cichlids in the African Great Lakes, and for studies of the phylogeny and systematics of teleosts.
Go to Profile#5075
Daphne Gail Fautin
#88088
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Daphne Gail Fautin was an American professor of invertebrate zoology at the University of Kansas, specializing in sea anemones and symbiosis. She is world-renowned for her extensive work studying and classifying sea anemones and related species. A large sea anemone-like cnidarian species has been named in her honor, originally called Boloceroides daphneae, but recently renamed to Relicanthus daphneae, after it was discovered to belong to a previously unknown cnidarian order. Fautin has published numerous scientific articles and texts—including co-authoring Encyclopædia Britannica's entry on cnidarians—and her publications have been widely cited by other researchers in the field.
Go to Profile#5076
Christer Betsholtz
#101226
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
#5077
Elizabeth Gould
#60150
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Elizabeth Gould is an American neuroscientist and the Dorman T. Warren Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. She was an early investigator of adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a research area that continues to be controversial. In November 2002, Discover magazine listed her as one of the 50 most important women scientists.
Go to Profile#5078
Johannes Vogel
#92499
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Johannes Christian Vogel FLS FAAAS is a German botanist, who since 1 February 2012 has been Director General of the Museum für Naturkunde and Professor of Biodiversity and Public Science at Humboldt University, both in Berlin. He previously held the post of Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom from 2004 to 2012.
Go to Profile#5079
Robert Evans Ferrell
#101262
Overall Influence
#5080
Daphna Joel
#79275
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Daphna Joel is an Israeli neuroscientist and advocate for "neurofeminism". She is best known for her research which claims that there is no such thing as a "male brain" or a "female brain". Joel's research has been criticized by other neuroscientists who argue that male and female brains, on average, show distinct differences and can be classified with a high level of accuracy. Joel is a member of The NeuroGenderings Network, an international group of researchers in gender studies and neuroscience. They are critical of what they call neurosexism in the scientific community. Joel has given lec...
Go to Profile#5081
Andrew Singleton
#42822
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Andrew B. Singleton is a British neurogeneticist currently working in the USA. He was born in Guernsey, the Channel Islands in 1972, where he lived until he was 18 years old. His secondary education was conducted at the Guernsey Grammar School. He earned a first class degree in Applied Physiology from Sunderland University and his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne where he studied the genetics of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias at the Medical Research Council Neurochemical Pathology Unit. He moved to the United States in 1999, where he began working at the...
Go to Profile#5082
Mikhail Chailakhyan
#47597
Overall Influence
1902 - 1991 (89 years)
Mikhail Khristoforovich Chailakhyan was an Armenian-Soviet scientist who is widely known for proposing the existence of a universal plant hormone that is involved in flowering. He named this hormone florigen in 1936. His studies included the mechanisms of flowering, tuberization and sex expression in plants. His pioneer work included the agricultural applications of phytohormones and synthetic analogs.
Go to Profile#5083
Gwendalyn J. Randolph
#45776
Overall Influence
Gwendalyn J. Randolph is an American immunologist, the Emil R. Unanue Distinguished Professor in the Department of Immunology and Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine where she is currently co-director of the Immunology Graduate Program. During her postdoctoral work, Randolph characterized monocyte differentiation to dendritic cells and macrophages and made advances in our understanding of dendritic cell trafficking and the fate of monocytes recruited to sites of inflammation. Her lab has contributed to the Immunological Genome Project by characterizing macrophage gene expression.
Go to Profile#5084
Sofia Simmonds
#78601
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Sofia S. "Topsy" Simmonds was an American biochemist who studied amino acid metabolism and peptide metabolism in E. coli. Following training with Vincent du Vigneaud at Cornell University, she spent most of her career at Yale University. After decades as a researcher and then associate professor there, Simmonds became a full professor of biochemistry in 1975, and later served as Associate Dean of Yale College. With her husband Joseph Fruton, Simmonds coauthored the influential General Biochemistry, the first comprehensive biochemistry textbook. Simmonds received the American Chemical Society'...
Go to Profile#5085
Hiralal Chaudhuri
#85126
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Dr. Hiralal Chaudhuri was an Indian Bengali fisheries scientist. He is known as the "father of induced breeding" of the carp. The Blue revolution in India was developed on the basis of his work on seed production technology through Hypophysation. He later led the way in intensive mixed farming to increase fish production in ponds.
Go to Profile#5086
Lindo Bacon
#85183
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Lindo Bacon, born and published as Linda Bacon, is a nutritionist, researcher and author. They have a doctorate in physiology and master's degrees in exercise science and psychotherapy. Much of Bacon's earliest work is in the Health at Every Size field, including Health at Every Size and Body Respect. Bacon's latest book, Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World was published in November 2020.
Go to Profile#5087
William Hayes
#90145
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
William Hayes FRCPI FRS FRSE LLD was an Irish geneticist. Early life He was born in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, the only son of William Hayes, a successful Dublin pharmacist, and his second wife, Miriam, née Harris. Hayes was still a child when his father died, and he lived with his mother and grandmother and was educated at home by a governess, before going to a preparatory school in Dalkey and then in 1927 to St Columba's College at Rathfarnham, where his early interest in science began to develop as a hobby. He read medicine at Trinity College Dublin, graduated BA in Natural Science in 1936 an...
Go to Profile#5088
Mogens Schou
#45138
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Mogens Schou was a Danish psychiatrist whose research into lithium led to its utilization as a treatment for bipolar disorder. Early years Schou was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 24 November 1918. His father was a psychiatrist and medical director of a large mental hospital. Schou chose to study medicine with a specific view to doing research on manic-depressive illness . He graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Copenhagen in 1944. After his training in clinical psychiatry he also studied experimental biology.
Go to Profile#5089
Kim Barrett
#94938
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Kim Elaine Barrett is a research physiologist, specialising in digestive disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease. She was Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Dean of the Graduate Division at University of California, San Diego before moving to her current position as Vice Dean for Research and Distinguished Professor of Physiology and Membrane Biology in the School of Medicine at University of California, Davis in 2021. She was the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Physiology from 2016–2022, and is a Past-President of the American Physiological Society.
Go to Profile#5090
Jean Pieters
#93419
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jean Pieters is a Dutch biochemist and Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland. Life Jean Pieters studied biochemistry and microbiology at the University of Leuven in Belgium. After completing his doctorate at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, he joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg in 1989 as a postdoctoral fellow in Bernhard Dobberstein’s laboratory. From 1992 until 1995 Jean Pieters researched at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam as a junior group leader. In 1996 he was recruited to the Basel Institute for Immunology a...
Go to Profile#5091
Marilyn S. Albert
#101430
Overall Influence
#5092
Gerry Melino
#101435
Overall Influence
#5093
John H. Crowe
#96641
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
John Henry Crowe is an American comparative physiologist. He is primarily known for his work on the mechanisms dehydration and rehydration of cryptobiotic organism, including tardigrades. His work included the discovery of trehalose as a cryoprotectant for cell membranes and the use of trahalose and other cryoprotectants for the preservation of human blood components including platelets for longer-term storage
Go to Profile#5094
Michael Y. Aviram
#101488
Overall Influence
#5095
Jack Gauldie
#100122
Overall Influence
Jack Gauldie, is a Canadian pathologist, having been a Distinguished University Professor at McMaster University.
Go to Profile#5096
Allan C Spradling
#101498
Overall Influence
#5097
Donald R. Ort
#99036
Overall Influence
Donald Richard Ort is an American botanist and biochemist. He is the Robert Emerson Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he works on improving crop productivity and resilience to climate change by redesigning photosynthesis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Society of Plant Biologists .
Go to Profile#5098
Meier Schwarz
#75227
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Meier Schwarz was an Israeli plant physiologist. He was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and escaped from the Nazi regime on a Kindertransport to Jerusalem. In Israel, he was a lecturer and scholar, and was appointed head of the Hydroponics department at the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research in Beer Sheva.
Go to Profile#5099
Alfred W. Crompton
#98716
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Alfred Walter "Fuzz" Crompton is a South African paleontologist and zoologist. Crompton studied at the University of Stellenbosch and obtained a bachelor's degree in 1947 and a masters in 1949, in zoology. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 1953.
Go to Profile#5100
Erich Oberdorfer
#51920
Overall Influence
1905 - 2002 (97 years)
Erich Oberdorfer was a German biologist specializing in phytosociology and phytogeography. His official botanical author abbreviation is “Oberd." Early life and education Oberdorfer was born in Freiburg. After graduating from high school in 1923, he studied biological sciences at the University of Freiburg and University of Tübingen. In Freiburg he heard lectures from Hans Spemann and Friedrich Oltmann, among others . In addition to Felix Rawitscher, Walter Zimmermann, who was assistant to Friedrich Oltmanns at the time, was one of his teachers. He graduated in Freiburg in 1928 with a docto...
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