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,
#5801
Casper Hoogenraad
#103080
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Casper Hoogenraad is a Dutch Cell Biologist who specializes in molecular neuroscience. The focus of his research is the basic molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate the development and function of the brain. As of January 2020, he serves as Vice President of Neuroscience at Genentech Research and Early Development.
Go to Profile#5802
Denis Baylor
#87532
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Denis Aristide Baylor was an American neurobiologist. He was professor emeritus of neurobiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research on nerve cells in the retina of the eye. He developed a widely-used method for observing the electrical activity of single rod and cone photoreceptor cells and described how they encode light stimuli. Baylor’s work has been recognized by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society of London.
Go to Profile#5803
Diana Reiss
#59204
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Diana Reiss is a professor of psychology at Hunter College and in the graduate program of Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology at the City University of New York. Reiss's research has focused on understanding cognition and communication in dolphins and other cetaceans. Her important contributions include demonstrating mirror self-awareness in dolphins via the Mirror test.
Go to Profile#5804
Terry Hughes
#59535
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Terence P. Hughes is a professor of marine biology at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. He is known for research on the global coral bleaching event caused by climate change. Nature dubbed him "Reef sentinel" in 2016 for the global role he plays in applying multi-disciplinary science to securing reef sustainability. He is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. His research interests encompass coral reef ecology, macroecology and evolution, as well as social-ecological interactions.
Go to Profile#5805
Nadia Pinardi
#66345
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Nadia Pinardi is an Italian oceanographer and academic. Early life and education She was born in Bologna and studied physics at the University of Bologna. Pinardi went on to receive a master's degree in applied physics and a PhD in applied physics from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#5806
Alexander Wlodawer
#108114
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
#5807
Silvio S. Varon
#108115
Overall Influence
#5808
Paul Willis
#63992
Overall Influence
Paul M. A. Willis is an Australian palaeontologist, science communicator and former Director of the Royal Institution of Australia . Career Willis studied zoology and geology at University of Sydney and went on to complete a PhD in palaeontology at the University of New South Wales. He has been a resident palaeontologist on ten Antarctic expeditions and has written or co-authored eight books on dinosaurs, rocks and fossils.
Go to Profile#5809
Jean‐claude Henquin
#108144
Overall Influence
#5810
Joel Stefaan Vandekerckhove
#108150
Overall Influence
#5811
Øjvind Moestrup
#100530
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Øjvind Moestrup is a Danish aquatic botanist, working particularly with the classification of algae. He worked at the Botanical Institute at the University of Copenhagen and is a professor emeritus in the Department of Biology there. He published over 100 scientific papers.
Go to Profile#5812
Nancy Huntly
#84919
Overall Influence
Nancy Huntly is an American ecologist based at Utah State University, where she is a Professor in the Department of Biology and director of the USU Ecology Center. Her research has been on biodiversity, herbivory, and long-term human ecology. She started her position at USU in 2011, after serving as a Program Officer in the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation. Prior to that she was a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University .
Go to Profile#5813
Audun Rikardsen
#96629
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Audun Rikardsen is a Norwegian biologist and wildlife photographer. He is professor at The Department of Arctic and Marine Biology at University of Tromsø. Most of his research is related to freshwater and marine ecology and migrations of the Atlantic of anadromous salmonids, marine parasitology, fish-marking and trapping techniques, telemetry, suitability analysis for locations of fish farms, coastal zone and watercourse management, consequence analysis and freshwater fish surveys.
Go to Profile#5814
Arnold van Huis
#100784
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Arnold van Huis is a Professor of Tropical Entomology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Biography Van Huis studied as an undergraduate at the State Horticultural College in Utrecht, and as a graduate student at Wageningen University. From 1974 to 1979, he worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Nicaragua.
Go to Profile#5815
Michael Denis Gale
#64351
Overall Influence
1943 - 2009 (66 years)
Michael Denis Gale FRS was a British plant geneticist. He studied at West Buckland School, Birmingham University, and Aberystwyth University with Hubert Rees. He worked at the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge, and the John Innes Centre, Norwich Research Park. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1996.
Go to Profile#5816
Randy Seeley
#94285
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Randy J. Seeley is an American medical academic. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1989 with a degree in psychology, and earned a master's and doctoral degree in the subject from University of Pennsylvania in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Seeley completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington in 1995, and taught there until 1997, when he moved to the University of Cincinnati, where he was named the first Donald C. Harrison Endowed Chair in Medicine in 2008. In 2014, he joined the University of Michigan faculty, and was appointed Henry King Ransom Endowed Professor of Sur...
Go to Profile#5817
Yechiel Becker
#108176
Overall Influence
#5818
Raymond P. Kesner
#108180
Overall Influence
#5819
Elena J. Tucker
#69759
Overall Influence
Elena Jane Tucker is an Australian geneticist and medical genomics researcher and a 2016 Rising Talent in the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards. Biography Tucker earned her B.S. at University of Melbourne in 2006. She earned her Ph.D in medical genomics at the same university's Murdoch Children's Research Institute in 2011 focusing on using new approaches to genomics to improve the diagnosis and management of patients with mitochondrial disease. She continues to work there as a research fellow, investigating the molecular basis of disorders of sex development.
Go to Profile#5820
Arturo Gómez-Pompa
#57475
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Arturo Gómez-Pompa is a tropical biologist, a scientific advisor for the Tropical Research Center of the Universidad Veracruzana , and a professor emeritus of botany at the University of California, Riverside. He made various contributions to the field of tropical ecology through the creation of databases used in botanical research, and he contributed to the research on the domestication of tropical trees.
Go to Profile#5821
Emily Willingham
#50550
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Emily Jane Willingham is an American journalist and scientist. Her writing focuses on neuroscience, genetics, psychology, health and medicine, and occasionally on evolution and ecology. She is the joint recipient with David Robert Grimes of the 2014 John Maddox Prize, awarded by science charity Sense about Science, for standing up for science in the face of personal attacks.
Go to Profile#5822
Joan S. Valentine
#68925
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Joan Selverstone Valentine is a biological inorganic chemist and biochemist. Valentine's current work examines the role of transition metals, metalloenzymes, and oxidative stress in health. Her foremost expertise is superoxide anion and its functional enzyme superoxide dismutase. Valentine has been a member of the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles since 1980. She served as Associate Editor of the journal Inorganic Chemistry from 1989 to 1995, and has served as Editor-in-Chief of Accounts of Chemical Research since 1994. In 2005, she was elected to the National Academy of Sc...
Go to Profile#5823
Isabelle M. Côté
#107045
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Isabelle M. Côté is a professor of marine ecology at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Life and education Côté is from Montreal, Quebec. She received her B.Sc. in marine biology from McGill University in 1984, her M.Sc. in zoology from the University of Alberta in 1987, and her Ph.D. in behavioral ecology from the University of Toronto in 1993. Her research is notable for its impact on coral reef conservation.
Go to Profile#5824
Kenneth W. Bruland
#108253
Overall Influence
#5825
Colin Berry
#108258
Overall Influence
#5826
Peter Sterling
#81752
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter Sterling is an American anatomist, physiologist and neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is the author of What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design , and with Simon Laughlin, is an author of Principles of Neural Design.
Go to Profile#5827
Henry Daniell
#108277
Overall Influence
#5828
María Elena Caso
#103302
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
María Elena Caso was a Mexican biologist who pioneered the study of starfish and other echinoderms in Mexico. She started the National Collection of Equinoderms in Mexico, the most important one in Latin America, which currently counts with at least 100.000 samples from 800 species from the Mexican coast and participated in the foundation of the laboratory of hydrobiology of the Biology Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, currently known as "Marine Sciences and Limnology Institute". She became a reference scientist in marine biodiversity.
Go to Profile#5829
Beth Stevens
#59642
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Beth Stevens is an associate professor in the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. She has helped to identify the role of microglia and complement proteins in the "pruning" or removal of synaptic cells during brain development, and has also determined that the impaired or abnormal microglial function could be responsible for diseases like autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's.
Go to Profile#5830
Leon V. Kochian
#108335
Overall Influence
#5831
David Roy Davies
#108349
Overall Influence
#5832
Christa Schleper
#89019
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Christa Schleper is a German microbiologist known for her work on the evolution and ecology of Archaea. Schleper is Head of the Department of Functional and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Vienna in Austria.
Go to Profile#5833
Henry W. Murray
#108354
Overall Influence
#5834
Purnell W. Choppin
#108360
Overall Influence
#5835
Rutherford Ness Robertson
#79929
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Sir Rutherford Ness "Bob" Robertson AC CMG FAA FRS HFRSE was an Australian botanist and biologist, and winner of the Clarke Medal in 1955. Life Robertson was born in Melbourne, Victoria , the son of Rev J. Robertson.
Go to Profile#5836
Ruth Buskirk
#104327
Overall Influence
Ruth Buskirk is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She has served on the university's faculty for over twenty five years and is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Biology. She holds the Worthington Endowed Professorship for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Plan II.
Go to Profile#5837
Andrew Lumsden
#99985
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Andrew Gino Lumsden is an English neurobiologist, Emeritus Professor of the University of London and founder in 2000 of the Medical Research Council Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King's College London.
Go to Profile#5838
Juliane Koepcke
#24876
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Juliane Margaret Beate Koepcke , also known by her married name Juliane Diller, is a German-Peruvian mammalogist who specialises in bats. The daughter of German zoologists Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, she became famous at the age of 17 as the sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash; after falling while strapped to her seat and suffering numerous injuries, she survived 11 days alone in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest until she was rescued by local fishermen after finding their camp.
Go to Profile#5839
Su-Chun Zhang
#83983
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Su-Chun Zhang , is an American stem cell researcher at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Biography Zhang obtained MD from the Wenzhou Medical College, Wenzhou, and PhD from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Go to Profile#5840
Harry L.T. Mobley
#108297
Overall Influence
Dr. Mobley received his Ph.D. at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and conducted postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Biochemistry and Vaccine Development, after which he joined the faculty in the Division of Infectious Diseases and rose to the rank of Professor of Microbiology and Immunology. After 23 years at Maryland, Dr. Mobley was named Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School in 2004, serving in this role until 2019. Dr. Mobley’s research focuses on uropathogenic E. coli and Proteu...
Go to Profile#5841
Marie Dacke
#50774
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Marie Ann-Charlotte Dacke is a professor in the Lund Vision Group at Lund University in Sweden. She received an Ig Nobel Prize in 2013 for her work on the navigation system of dung beetles. She is also a panel member on the Swedish TV show Studio Natur, and was named best science communicator in Sweden during the 2012 Forskar Grand Prix.
Go to Profile#5842
Robert E. Hammer
#108389
Overall Influence
#5843
Sybil P. Seitzinger
#33192
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Sybil P. Seitzinger is an oceanographer and climate scientist at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. She is known for her research into climate change and elemental cycling, especially nitrogen biogeochemistry.
Go to Profile#5844
John K. Wing
#108405
Overall Influence
#5845
Janet Wilder Dakin
#60561
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Janet Wilder Dakin , was an American philanthropist and zoologist, known for her animal advocacy and environmental work. Biography Janet Frances Wilder was born in China, the daughter of Isabella Niven and Amos Parker Wilder. She was the youngest of several siblings who would become well known in adulthood: theologist and poet Amos Niven Wilder, author Thornton Wilder, poet Charlotte Wilder and writer Isabel Wilder.
Go to Profile#5846
Isaac Marks
#30953
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Isaac Meyer Marks was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He trained in medicine there, qualifying in 1956. His training as a psychiatrist began in 1960 at the University of London and was completed in 1963. In 1971 he was a founder Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and in 1976 he was elected a Fellow.
Go to Profile#5847
Rajita Sinha
#108426
Overall Influence
#5848
Milan N. Popović
#29907
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Milan Popović was a renowned Serbian psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, a full professor of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. Biography He was born in 1924 in Belgrade, Serbia. He graduated from the University of Belgrade School of Medicine, specialized neuropsychiatry and was awarded a doctor's degree with the theme "Group psychotherapy of the schizophrenic in hospital conditions". He was elected associate professor of the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University in 1972 and full professor in 1980.
Go to Profile#5849
Ernest April
#92078
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Ernest Wilfred April was a professional anatomist at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons who gained prominence for his controversial defense of the use of Nazi medical drawings in anatomy textbooks. He was best known for championing Pernkopf atlas, a volume composed by leading Austrian Nazi Eduard Pernkopf. April described the atlas as "a phenomenal book, very complete and thorough and authoritative."
Go to Profile#5850
Kyung J. Kwon‐chung
#108446
Overall Influence
