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,
#551
H. Bentley Glass
#13786
Overall Influence
1906 - 2005 (99 years)
Hiram Bentley Glass was an American geneticist and noted columnist. Career Born in China to missionary parents, he attended college at Baylor University in Texas. He then furthered his education at the University of Texas, where he received his Ph.D. degree under the mentorship of geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller. His first major academic appointment was at Johns Hopkins University, at which time he was also a regular columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper. He taught at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri and at Goucher College in Maryland before joining the faculty at Johns Hop...
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Joachim Bauer
#8530
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Joachim Bauer is a German medical doctor with education in internal medicine, psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine. He teaches as a professor at the University of Freiburg. Bauer is the author of several scientific non-fiction books.
Go to Profile#553
Peer Bork
#22979
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Peer Bork is a German bioinformatician. He is Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory site in Heidelberg, in south-west Germany. Bork received his PhD in biochemistry in 1990 from the Leipzig University and his habilitation in theoretical biophysics in 1995 from the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was appointed a Group Leader at EMBL in 1995. He has worked on the microbiomes of humans and other animals.
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Peter Beyer
#16084
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter Beyer is a German Professor for Cell Biology at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Freiburg. He is known as co-inventor of Golden Rice, together with Ingo Potrykus from the ETH Zurich.
Go to Profile#555
Valerius Geist
#9578
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Valerius Geist was a Canadian biologist and a professor emeritus in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary. He was a specialist on the biology, behavior, and social dynamics of North American large mammals , and well respected on his views of Neanderthal people and behavior.
Go to Profile#556
Bruce William Stillman
#19388
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Bruce William Stillman, AO, FAA, FRS is a biochemist and cancer researcher who has served as the Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1994 and President since 2003. He also served as the Director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center for 25 years from 1992 to 2016. During his leadership, CSHL has been ranked as the No. 1 institution in molecular biology and genetics research by Thomson Reuters. Stillman's research focuses on how chromosomes are duplicated in human cells and in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae; the mechanisms that ensure accurate inheritance of genetic material from one generation to the next; and how missteps in this process lead to cancer.
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Mary-Claire King
#7696
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mary-Claire King is an American geneticist. She was the first to show that breast cancer can be inherited due to mutations in the gene she called BRCA1. She studies human genetics and is particularly interested in genetic heterogeneity and complex traits. She studies the interaction of genetics and environmental influences and their effects on human conditions such as breast and ovarian cancer, inherited deafness, schizophrenia, HIV, systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. She has been the American Cancer Society Professor of the Department of Genome Sciences and of Medical Ge...
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Robert Galambos
#11917
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Robert Carl Galambos was an American neuroscientist whose pioneering research demonstrated how bats use echolocation for navigation purposes, as well as studies on how sound is processed in the brain.
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Ben Barres
#9570
Overall Influence
1954 - 2017 (63 years)
Ben A. Barres was an American neurobiologist at Stanford University. His research focused on the interaction between neurons and glial cells in the nervous system. Beginning in 2008, he was chair of the Neurobiology Department at Stanford University School of Medicine. He transitioned to male in 1997, and became the first openly transgender scientist in the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.
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Wolf Singer
#10585
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Wolf Joachim Singer is a German neurophysiologist. Life and career Singer was born in Munich and studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1965 onwards and 1965/66 two semesters at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1968, he received his Ph.D. from Ludwig Maximilian University with his doctoral thesis on "The role of telencephalic commissures in bilateral EEG-synchrony." His doctoral supervisor was Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt of the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry. During his advanced training in neurophysiology, he spent a year at the University of Sussex in England. In 19...
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Amotz Zahavi
#6950
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Amotz Zahavi was an Israeli evolutionary biologist, a Professor in the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. His main work concerned the evolution of signals, particularly those signals that are indicative of fitness, and their selection for "honesty".
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Avrion Mitchison
#17951
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Avrion Mitchison was a British zoologist and immunologist. Biography Mitchison was born in 1928, the son of the Labour politician Dick Mitchison and his wife, the writer Naomi . His uncle was the biologist J.B.S. Haldane and his grandfather the physiologist John Scott Haldane. His elder brothers are the bacteriologist Denis Mitchison and the zoologist Murdoch Mitchison.
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Jozef Schell
#16958
Overall Influence
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Jozef Stefaan "Jeff", Baron Schell was a Belgian molecular biologist. Schell studied zoology and microbiology at the University of Ghent, Belgium. From 1967 to 1995 he worked as a professor at the university. From 1978 to 2000 he was director and head of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research at the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Cologne, Germany. He received many prizes, among which were the Francqui Prize in 1979, the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 1990, and the Japan Prize in 1998, which he shared with Marc Van Montagu. He also was appointed Professeur Honoraire, Collège de France, Paris in 1998.
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Kimishige Ishizaka
#11569
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Kimishige "Kimi" Ishizaka was a Japanese immunologist who, with his wife Teruko Ishizaka, discovered the antibody class Immunoglobulin E in 1966–1967. Their work was regarded as a major breakthrough in the understanding of allergy. He was awarded the 1973 Gairdner Foundation International Award and the 2000 Japan Prize for his work in immunology.
Go to Profile#565
Nora Volkow
#5509
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nora D. Volkow is a Mexican-American psychiatrist. She is currently the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse , which is part of the National Institutes of Health . Early life and education Born in Mexico City, Volkow is a daughter of Esteban Volkov, whose mother Zinaida Volkova was the eldest daughter of the Russian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Volkow and her three sisters grew up in Coyoacán in the house where Trotsky was killed .
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Gerald Reaven
#17127
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Gerald M. "Jerry" Reaven was an American endocrinologist and professor emeritus in medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California, United States. Reaven's work on insulin resistance and diabetes mellitus with John W. Farquhar goes back at least to 1965.
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William Glasser
#1389
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
William Glasser was an American psychiatrist. He was the developer of W. Edwards Deming's workplace ideas, reality therapy and choice theory. His innovations for individual counseling, work environments and school, highlight personal choice, personal responsibility and personal transformation. Glasser positioned himself in opposition to conventional mainstream psychiatrists, who focus instead on classifying psychiatric syndromes as "illnesses" and prescribe psychotropic medications to treat mental disorders.
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Janet Thornton
#16004
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Dame Janet Maureen Thornton, is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute , part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory . She is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.
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Tadatsugu Taniguchi
#12257
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Tadatsugu Taniguchi is a Japanese immunologist known for his pioneer research on Interferons and Interferon regulatory factors. Contribution Taniguchi's work is mostly focused on immunity and oncogenesis, in particular on the mechanisms of signal transduction and gene expression. While working at the Cancer Institute in Tokyo, he conducted breakthrough research on sequencing the cDNA, and identified two cytokine genes, interferon-beta and interleukin-2. These advances helped characterize various cytokines and discover a new family of transcription factors, interferon regulatory factors, which ...
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Freek Vonk
#21883
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Freek Jacobus Vonk is a Dutch biologist who specializes in herpetology with a special interest in snake venom. He travels the world in search of the most spectacular and bizarre creatures. He has been bitten by a number of venomous snakes, almost lost his arm due to a Caribbean reef shark bite and has housed several parasites in his own body.
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Beatrice Mintz
#11450
Overall Influence
1921 - 2022 (101 years)
Beatrice Mintz was an American embryologist who contributed to the understanding of genetic modification, cellular differentiation, and cancer, particularly melanoma. Mintz was a pioneer of genetic engineering techniques and was among the first scientists to generate both chimeric and transgenic mammals.
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A. Dale Kaiser
#20248
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Armin Dale Kaiser was an American biochemist, molecular geneticist, molecular biologist and developmental biologist. Biography Kaiser received in 1950 his bachelor's degree from Purdue University and in 1955 his PhD from Caltech in biology. At Caltech he was in Max Delbrück's bacteriophage group and received his PhD in biology under Jean Weigle with thesis A genetic analysis of bacteriophage lambda. Kaiser was in 1956 a postdoc at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and afterward became an instructor and then in 1958 an assistant professor in microbiology at Washington University in St. Louis. I...
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Manel Esteller
#19386
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Manel Esteller graduated in medicine from the University of Barcelona in 1992, where he also obtained his doctorate, specializing in the molecular genetics of endometrial carcinoma, in 1996. He was an invited researcher at the School of Biological and Medical Sciences at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, during which time his research interests focused on the molecular genetics of inherited breast cancer.
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Erin K. O'Shea
#17291
Overall Influence
Erin K. O'Shea is an American biologist who is president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . In 2013, she was named HHMI's vice president and chief scientific officer. Prior to that, she was a professor of molecular and cellular biology and chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. In 2016, her appointment as future, and first woman, president of HHMI was announced. She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000.
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Susan Hockfield
#2409
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Susan Hockfield is an American neuroscientist who served as the sixteenth president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from December 2004 through June 2012. Hockfield succeeded Charles M. Vest and was succeeded by L. Rafael Reif, who had served in her administration as Provost. Hockfield was the first biologist and the first woman to serve as the Institute's president. Hockfield currently serves as a Professor of Neuroscience in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a Joint Professor of Work and Organization Studies in MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
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Maqsudul Alam
#12149
Overall Influence
1954 - 2014 (60 years)
Maqsudul Alam was an East Bengal-born life-science scientist who is known for his work on genome sequencing. His work on genome sequencing started with bacteria Idiomarina loihiensis in 2003. He came into the focus of Bangladeshi people after his work on genome sequencing of jute species and jute attacking fungus.
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Michael Marletta
#10454
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael A. Marletta is an American biochemist. He was born in Rochester, New York, the son of Italian immigrants. He graduated from the State University of New York at Fredonia in 1973 with an A.B. degree in biology and chemistry, and from the University of California, San Francisco in 1978 with a Ph.D. degree in pharmaceutical chemistry, where he studied with George Kenyon. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Christopher T. Walsh at MIT from 1978-1980 and continued as a faculty member at MIT from 1980-1987 whereupon he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was John G. ...
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Ruth Lehmann
#20551
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ruth Lehmann is a developmental and cell biologist. She is the Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She previously was affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine, where she was the Director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology, and the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology. Her research focuses on germ cells and embryogenesis.
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Michael Benton
#10539
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael James Benton is a British palaeontologist, and professor of vertebrate palaeontology in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. His published work has mostly concentrated on the evolution of Triassic reptiles but he has also worked on extinction events and faunal changes in the fossil record.
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Joseph R. Lakowicz
#25157
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Joseph Raymond Lakowicz is an American biochemist . He is a professor at the school of medicine of the University of Maryland in Baltimore and director of the Center for Fluorescence Spectroscopy and author of the standard work in this field, which was published in 2006 in the third edition.
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Chi-Huey Wong
#6808
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Chi-Huey Wong is a Taiwanese-American biochemist. He is currently the Scripps Family Chair Professor at the Scripps Research Institute, California in the department of chemistry. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, as awarded the 2014 Wolf Prize in Chemistry and 2015 RSC Robert Robinson Award. Wong is also the holder of more than 100 patents and publisher of more 700 scholarly academic research papers under his name.
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May Berenbaum
#17315
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
May Roberta Berenbaum is an American entomologist whose research focuses on the chemical interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants, and the implications of these interactions on the organization of natural communities and the evolution of species. She is particularly interested in nectar, plant phytochemicals, honey and bees, and her research has important implications for beekeeping.
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Joseph H. Connell
#14800
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Joseph Hurd Connell FAA was an American ecologist. He earned his MA degree in zoology at the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD at Glasgow University. Connell's first research paper examined the effects of interspecific competition and predation on populations of a barnacle species on the rocky shores of Scotland. According to Connell, this classic paper is often cited because it addressed ecological topics that previously had been given minor roles. Together, with a subsequent barnacle study on the influence of competition and desiccation, these two influential papers have la...
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Kazutoshi Mori
#8815
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
is a Japanese molecular biologist known for research on unfolded protein response. He is a professor of Biophysics at the Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, and shared the 2014 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Peter Walter for discoveries concerning the unfolded protein response — an intracellular quality control system that detects harmful misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum and signals the nucleus to carry out corrective measures.
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Michael Rossmann
#10931
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Michael G. Rossmann was a German-American physicist, microbiologist, and Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at Purdue University who led a team of researchers to be the first to map the structure of a human common cold virus to an atomic level. He also discovered the Rossmann fold protein motif. His most well recognised contribution to structural biology is the development of a phasing technique named molecular replacement, which has led to about three quarters of depositions in the Protein Data Bank.
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Roberto Burioni
#15512
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Roberto Burioni is an Italian virologist, physician, and academic. A Professor of Microbiology and Virology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, he runs there a lab developing human monoclonal antibodies against human infectious agents, the study of pathogen-host interplay, and the use of molecular tools in the early diagnosis of infectious diseases. A prominent virologist, Burioni has risen to fame in Italy for his strong stance against the antivaccination movement and has been described as the "most famous virologist in Italy".
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Gregory Winter
#13173
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Sir Gregory Paul Winter is a Nobel Prize-winning English molecular biologist best known for his work on the therapeutic use of monoclonal antibodies. His research career has been based almost entirely at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, in Cambridge, England.
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Michael Houghton
#4781
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#589
Ann Graybiel
#12504
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ann Martin Graybiel is an Institute Professor and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is an expert on the basal ganglia and the neurophysiology of habit formation, implicit learning, and her work is relevant to Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance abuse and other disorders that affect the basal ganglia.
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Jason Bond
#11390
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jason E. Bond is an American biologist working as a Professor of Entomology and the Schlinger Chair in Insect Systematics at the University of California, Davis. Education Bond attended Western Carolina University, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in biology in 1993. He earned a Master of Science in biology and Ph.D. in evolutionary systematics and genetics from Virginia Tech.
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Frederick M. Ausubel
#19881
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Frederick M Ausubel is an American molecular biologist and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston and is the Karl Winnacker Distinguished Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston., Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#592
Anthony Atala
#4732
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Anthony Atala is an American bioengineer, urologist, and pediatric surgeon. He is the W.H. Boyce professor of urology, the founding director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. His work focuses on the science of regenerative medicine: "a practice that aims to refurbish diseased or damaged tissue using the body's own healthy cells".
Go to Profile#593
Douglas R. Green
#23834
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Douglas Green , is an American biologist. He holds the Peter C. Doherty Endowed Chair of Immunology in St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. His research has focused on the process of active cell death and cell survival, extending from the role of cell death in cancer regulation and immune responses in the whole organism to the molecular events directing the death of the cell. Green was editor in chief of the journal Oncogene from 2009-2016, is a Deputy Editor of the journal "Science Advances" and the author of the book Cell Death, Means To An End.
Go to Profile#594
Gene Likens
#14272
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Gene Elden Likens is an American limnologist and ecologist. He co-founded the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in 1963, and founded the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York in 1983.
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Roger Conant
#8902
Overall Influence
1909 - 2003 (94 years)
Roger Conant was an American herpetologist, author, educator and conservationist. He was Director Emeritus of the Philadelphia Zoo and adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico. He wrote one of the first comprehensive field guides for North American reptiles in 1958 entitled: A Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of Eastern and Central North America, in the Peterson Field Guide series.
Go to Profile#596
Joseph Schlessinger
#18694
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joseph Schlessinger is a Yugoslav-born Israeli-American biochemist and biophysician. He is chair of the Pharmacology Department at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the founding director of the school's new Cancer Biology Institute. His area of research is signaling through tyrosine phosphorylation, which is important in many areas of cellular regulation, especially growth control and cancer. Schlessinger's work has led to an understanding of the mechanism of transmembrane signaling by receptor tyrosine kinases and how the resulting signals control cell...
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Heinz Ellenberg
#19491
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Heinz Ellenberg was a German biologist, botanist and ecologist. Ellenberg was an advocate of viewing ecological systems through holistic means. He developed 9–point scales for rating European plant preferences for light, temperature, continentality , nutrients, soil moisture, pH, and salinity.
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Carl H. June
#17354
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Carl H. June is an American immunologist and oncologist. He is currently the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He is most well known for his research on T cell therapies for the treatment of several forms of cancers. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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Stephen P. Hubbell
#20488
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Stephen P. Hubbell is an American ecologist on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of the unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography , which seeks to explain the diversity and relative abundance of species in ecological communities not by niche differences but by stochastic processes among ecologically equivalent species. Hubbell is also a senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. He is also well known for tropical forest studies. In 1980, he and Robin B. Foster of the Field Museum in Chicago, launched the first of the 50 hectare forest dynamics studies on Barro Colorado Island in Panama.
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Pier Paolo Pandolfi
#19358
Overall Influence
Pier Paolo Pandolfi is an Italian doctor, geneticist, molecular biologist, and cancer researcher. Early life and education Originally from Rome, Italy, Pandolfi studied medicine at the University of Perugia in Umbria in central Italy, where he began his research into acute promyelocytic leukemia. He received his MD in 1989, his Ph.D. in 1995, and did postgraduate work at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School.
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