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,
#5701
Stewart Sell
#107121
Overall Influence
#5702
Karen Oegema
#97959
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Karen Oegema is a molecular cell biologist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego. She is best known for her research with Caenorhabditis elegans , which her lab uses as a model system in their mission to dissect the molecular mechanics of cytokinesis. She was given the Women in Cell Biology Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research in 2017, as well as the Women in Cell Biology Junior Award for Excellence in Research in 2006.
Go to Profile#5703
Naoyuki Taniguchi
#107136
Overall Influence
#5704
Humphry Bowen
#43899
Overall Influence
1929 - 2001 (72 years)
Humphry John Moule Bowen was a British botanist and chemist. Early life and education Bowen was born in Oxford, son of the chemist Edmund Bowen and Edith Bowen . He attended the Dragon School, gaining a scholarship to Rugby School and then a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. He won the Gibbs Prize in 1949 and completed a DPhil in chemistry at Oxford University in 1953 before starting his professional career as a chemist. Bowen was also a proficient amateur actor in his early years, appearing with a young Ronnie Barker at Oxford.
Go to Profile#5705
Tamotsu Yoshimori
#107159
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#5706
Sven O. Kullander
#97337
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sven Oscar Kullander is a Swedish biologist specialised in ichthyology. He primarily researches cichlids – notably the genus Apistogramma and the Cichlasoma-complex – and other tropical fresh water fishes. He also has been working with endangered fish species in Sweden.
Go to Profile#5707
Aled Edwards
#77367
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Aled Morgan Edwards is the founder and Chief Executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium, a charitable public-private partnership. He is Professor of Medical Genetics and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, Visiting Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Professor at McGill University.
Go to Profile#5708
Kenneth Offit
#73173
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kenneth Offit is an American cancer geneticist and oncologist. He is currently Chief of the Clinical Genetics Service and the Robert and Kate Niehaus Chair in Inherited Cancer Genomics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Offit is also a member of the Program in Cancer Biology and Genetics at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, Professor of Medicine and Healthcare Policy and Research at Weill Cornell Medical College, and a member of both the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute and the Evaluation of Genomic Applications in Practice and Prevention working group of the U.S.
Go to Profile#5709
Ed Byrne
#33759
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sir Edward Byrne is a neuroscientist who served as Principal of King's College London from August 2014 until January 2021. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of Monash University. Early life and education Born 15 February 1952, Byrne grew up in northeast England, the son of a general practitioner, and moved to Australia at the age of 15. He studied medicine at the University of Tasmania, graduating with a Bachelor of Medical Science in 1971, Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery with First Class Honours in 1974, and a Doctor of Medicine in 1982. Byrne also holds a Master of Business A...
Go to Profile#5710
Jamshed R. (jamshed Rustom) Tata
#107182
Overall Influence
#5711
Takeshi Yasumoto
#107189
Overall Influence
#5712
Tracy L. Kahn
#77800
Overall Influence
Tracy Lynn Kahn is a citrus scientist, that currently serves as the 11th curator of University of California, Riverside Citrus Variety Collection since 1995, succeeding her master Willard Paul Bitters.
Go to Profile#5713
Jean-Lou Justine
#62687
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jean-Lou Justine , French parasitologist and zoologist, is a professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, and a specialist of fish parasites and invasive land planarians. Higher education and career Justine was in high school in Saint Raphaël, France, then an undergraduate student at the University of Nice , and at the École Normale Supérieure in Saint-Cloud after which he passed the Agrégation in 1977, and finally a graduate student at the University of Montpellier. He passed his PhD in 1980 and his Doctorat d'État in 1985, both in the University of Montpellier, unde...
Go to Profile#5714
Kari Juhani Syrjänen
#107211
Overall Influence
#5715
Raymond F. Burk
#107224
Overall Influence
#5716
Till Roenneberg
#55879
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Till Roenneberg is a professor of chronobiology at the Institute of Medical Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. Roenneberg, in collaboration with Martha Merrow, explores the impact of light on human circadian rhythms, focusing on aspects such as chronotypes and social jet lag in relation to health benefits.
Go to Profile#5717
Urtė Neniškytė
#96852
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Urtė Neniškytė is a Lithuanian neuroscientist. Her scientific interest and main area of work relates to the interaction of neurons and immune cells in the brain. She has studied the cellular mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease and is the co-author of the first articles about cell death in relation to phagocytosis.
Go to Profile#5718
Franz F. Hefti
#107262
Overall Influence
#5719
Jeffrey Zink
#88759
Overall Influence
Jeffrey I. Zink is an American molecular biologist and chemist currently a Distinguished Professor at University of California, Los Angeles whose interests are in materials, nanoscience, physical and inorganic chemistry. His current research is examining molecules containing metal and nanomaterials. He worked with Fraser Stoddart to help develop machines that could be applied to deliver drugs. According to Google Scholar, his highest citations are 2,503, 2,131, 1,968, 1,873, and 1,150 .
Go to Profile#5720
Daniel Francis Mcauley
#107304
Overall Influence
#5721
Eugene Debs Robin
#107309
Overall Influence
#5722
Noelle E. Cockett
#65763
Overall Influence
Noelle E. Cockett is an American geneticist and academic administrator who served as the 16th president of Utah State University. On November 22, 2022 Cockett announced she would retire as USU's president effective July 1, 2023.
Go to Profile#5723
Maria G. Castro
#74076
Overall Influence
Maria G. Castro is the R. C. Schneider Collegiate Professor of Neurosurgery and a Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Michigan Medical School. Her research focuses on cancer immunology and gliomas.
Go to Profile#5724
Dorothea Jameson
#36237
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Dorothea Jameson was an American cognitive psychologist who greatly contributed to the field of color and vision. Biography Jameson was born in Newton, Massachusetts. She went to Wellesley College. She elected psychology as her major in her first year because she was "intrigued that freshmen required special permission to enroll". She graduated in 1942. While at Welleseley she volunteered as a research assistant at Harvard, where she met her future husband, Leo Hurvich. They married in 1948.
Go to Profile#5725
Benjamin H. Landing
#107323
Overall Influence
#5726
Guenther Stotzky
#107331
Overall Influence
#5727
Yoshihide Tsujimoto
#107344
Overall Influence
#5728
David Cushing
#69527
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
David Henry Cushing FRS was an English born fisheries biologist, who is credited with the development the match/mismatch hypothesis as an explanation for reduced fish stockss as associated with climatic variability. David Cushing was the first to demonstrate what we now know as "recruitment overfishing" through his work on the collapse of the North Sea herring.
Go to Profile#5729
Richard P. Lifton
#107356
Overall Influence
#5730
Inge Grundke‐iqbal
#107376
Overall Influence
#5731
Nancy Grimm
#76829
Overall Influence
Nancy B. Grimm is an American ecosystem ecologist and professor at Arizona State University. Grimm's substantial contributions to the understanding of urban and arid ecosystem biogeochemistry are recognized in her numerous awards. Grimm is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Ecological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#5732
Ernst Wagner
#107413
Overall Influence
#5733
Louise Allcock
#88699
Overall Influence
Louise Allcock is a British researcher, best known for her work on ecology and evolution of the cephalopods of the Southern Ocean and deep sea. She is the editor of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Go to Profile#5734
R. Alan North
#107419
Overall Influence
#5735
Elizabeth Harry
#100482
Overall Influence
Elizabeth "Liz" Harry is Professor of Biology and Director of the ithree institute at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia . Career Harry obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Sydney before attending Harvard University as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow where she pioneered the development of fluorescence microscopy techniques for bacteria that enabled visualisation of the subcellular proteins inside bacterial cells. and revealed that the proteins within bacterial cells have specific cellular addresses.
Go to Profile#5736
Earle Gorton Linsley
#101009
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Earle Gorton Linsley was an American entomologist. In study at the University of California, Berkeley Linsley gained a Bachelor of Science in 1932, a Master of Science in 1933, and Doctorate in 1938.
Go to Profile#5737
Alan Cheetham
#99066
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Alan H. Cheetham is a paleobiologist and retired senior scientist and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Born in El Paso, Texas, January 30, 1928, Cheetham grew up in Taos, New Mexico, received B.S. and M.S. degrees in geology, and, under the guidance of Norman D. Newell, obtained his Ph.D. in paleontology from Columbia University in 1959. Until joining the Smithsonian in 1966, Cheetham was a member of the geology faculty at Louisiana State University; during his tenure there, he was also a visiting postdoctoral fellow at...
Go to Profile#5738
Michael Lynskey
#102366
Overall Influence
Michael Thomas Lynskey is a New Zealand academic and psychiatrist. He is Professor of Addictions in the National Addictions Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience of King's College London in the United Kingdom. He has previously held positions at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre of the University of New South Wales in Australia and at the Department of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in the United States. He trained in New Zealand, where he graduated with a master's degree from the University of Canterbury. He also attended th...
Go to Profile#5739
Ariel Darvasi
#79345
Overall Influence
1962 - 2018 (56 years)
Ariel Darvasi was a Professor of Genetics and former Head of Life Sciences Studies and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Sciences at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Ariel Darvasi was born in Santiago de Chile. At the age of 10 his family moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#5740
John Albert Raven
#71919
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John Albert Raven FRS FRSE is a British botanist, and emeritus professor at University of Dundee and the University of Technology Sydney. His primary research interests lie in the ecophysiology and biochemistry of marine and terrestrial primary producers such as plants and algae.
Go to Profile#5741
K. Chidananda Gowda
#20130
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
K. Chidananda Gowda is an Indian academic who served as the Vice-Chancellor of the Kuvempu University, which is located in the state of Karnataka, India. He is also the son-in-law of the Kannada Poet, Kuvempu, after whom the Kuvempu University is named. He has published many papers, mainly in the field of pattern recognition.
Go to Profile#5742
Rosario Rizzuto
#107538
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#5743
David Prangishvili
#99481
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Prangishvili is a virologist, Professor at the Pasteur Institute of Paris, and foremost authority on viruses infecting Archaea. Biography David Prangishvili gained a Master of Science degree in 1971 at Tbilisi State University, Georgia, and a PhD and Habilitation from Institute of Molecular Biology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He pioneered research on Archaea, the third domain of life, in the USSR and in 1986-1991 was a head of the department of Molecular Biology of Archaea at the Georgian Academy of Sciences, Tbilisi. In 1991-2004 he has worked in Germany, at Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry and at Regensburg University.
Go to Profile#5744
Baljit S. Khakh
#101862
Overall Influence
Baljit Singh Khakh is a British neuroscientist and Professor of Physiology and Neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Education and career Baljit Khakh completed his Ph.D. at University of Cambridge in 1995 in the laboratory of Patrick PA Humphrey. He then completed postdoctoral fellowships first in the laboratory of Graeme Henderson at the University of Bristol, then in the laboratories of Henry A. Lester and Norman Davidson at California Institute of Technology. In 2001, Khakh joined the faculty as a Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In 2006, Khakh ...
Go to Profile#5745
Karen Oberhauser
#96332
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Karen Suzanne Oberhauser is an American conservation biologist who specializies in monarch butterflies. Education and career She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology at Harvard College, a Bachelor of Science degree in natural science education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a PhD in ecology and behavioral biology at the University of Minnesota. Oberhauser is an adjunct professor in the Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology department and former director of the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota. In October 2017, she became the director of the Univers...
Go to Profile#5746
Scott Zona
#99830
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Scott Zona is an American botanist. From 1993 to 2008, he was the Palm Biologist at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. From 2008 to 2017, he served as the curator for the Florida International University Wertheim Conservatory. He is noted for his study of palms and is co-editor for Palms, the journal of the International Palm Society.
Go to Profile#5747
Manolis Kogevinas
#107559
Overall Influence
#5748
Jolanta Rabe‐jabłońska
#107561
Overall Influence
#5749
Valentina Greco
#98838
Overall Influence
Valentina Greco is an Italian-born biologist who teaches at the Yale School of Medicine as the Carolyn Walch Slayman Professor of Genetics and is an Associate Professor in the Cell Biology and Dermatology departments. Her research focuses on the role of skin stem cells in tissue regeneration.
Go to Profile#5750
Scott J. Hultgren
#107571
Overall Influence
Scott J. Hultgren is an American microbiologist who is currently a professor of molecular microbiology and director of the Center for Women's Infectious Diseases Research at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2011, he has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 along with 80 other new members. In December 2019 he was named Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. In April 2023, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the principal investigator at the Hultgren Lab at Washington University School of Medicine.
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