Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

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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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#651

L. David Mech

#16366

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Lucyan David Mech , also known as Dave Mech, is an American biologist specializing in the study of wolves. He is a senior research scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota. He has researched wolves since 1958 in locations including northern Minnesota, Isle Royale, Alaska, Yellowstone National Park, Ellesmere Island, and Italy.

#652

Lee M. Silver

#11673

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Lee M. Silver is an American biologist. He is a professor at Princeton University in the Department of molecular biology and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He also has joint appointments in the Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, the Office of Population Research, and the Princeton Environmental Institute, all at Princeton University.

#653

Frank Glaw

#13546

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Frank Rainer Glaw is a German herpetologist working at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München. Glaw studied biology in Cologne from 1987, where he completed his diploma. Thereafter, he attended the University of Bonn, from which he graduated in 1999, after completing his Ph.D. thesis titled Untersuchungen zur Bioakustik, Systematik, Artenvielfalt und Biogeographie madagassischer Anuren about the frogs of Madagascar, supervised by Professor Wolfgang Böhme.

#654

Paul R. Gross

#3849

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Paul R. Gross is a biologist and author, perhaps best known to the general public for Higher Superstition , written with Norman Levitt. Gross is the University Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Virginia; he previously served the university as Provost and vice-president. He has written widely on the intellectual conflicts of the science wars, biology, evolution, and creationism—for example, his book Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design , written with Barbara Forrest.

#655

Hans Kornberg

#11457

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Sir Hans Leo Kornberg, FRS was a British-American biochemist. He was Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Cambridge from 1975 to 1995, and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge from 1982 to 1995.

#656

Jerzy Rzedowski

#10114

Overall Influence

1926 - 2023 (97 years)

Jerzy Rzedowski Rotter was a Polish-born Mexican botanist, whose focus was on Mexican floristics, taxonomy, and ecology. Early life and education Rzedowski was born in Lwów, Poland to Arnold and Ernestyna Rzedowski. The family moved to Silesia when he was a child. When he was young the family was imprisoned in a concentration camp until World War II ended, when he was liberated by the Allies. They then travelled to Mexico in 1946 for a new life.

#657

Elisabeth Vrba

#11464

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Elisabeth S. Vrba is a paleontologist at Yale University who developed the turnover-pulse hypothesis. Education Vrba earned her Ph.D. in Zoology and Palaeontology at the University of Cape Town, in 1974. Vrba studied zoology and mathematical statistics at the University of Cape Town to earn her undergraduate degree. She remained there for doctoral study in zoology and paleontology to earn her Ph.D. After receiving her doctorate, Vrba conducted her early research on African fossil records over the last several million years, tracking the sequence of fossils from analyzing the geological strata and analyzing the morphology of the fossils.

#658

Peter Daszak

#9831

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Peter Daszak is a British zoologist, consultant and public expert on disease ecology, in particular on zoonosis. He is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention. He is also a member of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He lives in Suffern, New York.

#659

Paul M. Doty

#12670

Overall Influence

1920 - 2011 (91 years)

Paul Mead Doty was Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard University, specializing in the physical properties of macromolecules and strongly involved in peace and security policy issues. Biography Doty was born in Charleston, West Virginia. He graduated from Penn State University in 1941 and took his doctorate from Columbia University under Joseph Edward Mayer. From 1943-45, he was at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He joined the chemistry department Harvard University in 1948, became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1951, and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1957.

#660

Bertil Hille

#14202

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Bertil Hille is an Emeritus Professor, and the Wayne E. Crill Endowed Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. He is particularly well known for his pioneering research on cell signalling by ion channels. His book Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes has been the standard work on the subject, appearing in multiple editions since its first publication in 1984.

#661

Robert Spitzer

#2692

Overall Influence

1932 - 2015 (83 years)

Robert Leopold Spitzer was a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City. He was a major force in the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders .

#662

Charles Janeway

#18351

Overall Influence

1943 - 2003 (60 years)

Charles Alderson Janeway, Jr. was a noted immunologist who helped create the modern field of innate immunity. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he held a faculty position at Yale University's Medical School and was an Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

#663

Timothy A. Springer

#24330

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Timothy "Tim" A. Springer is an immunologist and the Latham Family Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is also a professor at the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and of the Division of Medical Sciences, and a Senior Investigator at the Research Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine of the Boston Children's Hospital. Springer is best known for discovering the first integrins, LFA-1, and intercellular adhesion molecules , and for elucidating how these cell adhesion molecules function in the immune system. In recent years, Springer's research interest has e...

#664

Euan Ashley

#15447

Overall Influence

Euan Angus Ashley is a Scottish physician, scientist, author, and founder based at Stanford University in California where he is Associate Dean in the School of Medicine and holds the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair of Genomics and Precision Health. He is known for helping establish the field of medical genomics.

#665

Webb Miller

#15481

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Webb Colby Miller is an American bioinformatician who is professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. Education Miller attended Whitman College, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1969.

#666

Stefan Jentsch

#21522

Overall Influence

1955 - 2016 (61 years)

Stefan Jentsch was a German cell biologist. He was a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. He is known for his pioneering work in the field of protein modifications by ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like modifiers.

#667

Gerd B. Müller

#22671

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Gerd B. Müller is an Austrian biologist who is emeritus professor at the University of Vienna where he was the head of the Department of Theoretical Biology in the Center for Organismal Systems Biology. His research interests focus on vertebrate limb development, evolutionary novelties, evo-devo theory, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. He is also concerned with the development of 3D based imaging tools in developmental biology.

#668

Jack L. Strominger

#23887

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Jack Leonard Strominger is the Higgins Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard University, specializing in the structure and function of human histocompatibility proteins and their role in disease. He won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995.

#669

Neil Risch

#6883

Overall Influence

Neil Risch is an American human geneticist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco . Risch is the Lamond Family Foundation Distinguished Professor in Human Genetics and Director of the Institute for Human Genetics and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF.

#670

Miguel Vences

#12894

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Professor Miguel Vences is a German herpetologist and evolutionary biologist. Much of his research is focused on the reptiles and amphibians of Madagascar. Life The son of Galiciann philosopher Sergio Vences Fernández , Vences attended the Schiller-Gymnasium Köln from 1979 to 1988, and graduated with the German Abitur. The following year he began to study Biology at the University of Cologne. There he met Frank Glaw, and as undergraduate students they undertook their first excursions to Madagascar. After completing the Vordiplom in 1993, Vences transferred to the University of Bonn and the Museum König, where he completed his Diplom studies.

#671

Dagfinn Aarskog

Dagfinn Aarskog

#10278

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Dagfinn Aarskog was a Norwegian physician. Life He was born in Ålesund, Norway. He received his MD at the University of Bergen in 1956, and received a PhD in medicine in 1965. Aarskog was a specialist in pediatrics from 1964 and in medical genetics from 1974. In the period 1964 to 1965, he worked as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

#672

Ernst Josef Fittkau

Ernst Josef Fittkau

#27204

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Ernst Josef Fittkau was a German entomologist and herpetologist. Career In entomology he specialized in the Diptera, especially the family Chironomidae. In herpetology he specialized in crocodiles. He collected natural history specimens on every continent except Antarctica, beginning with South America in 1960. He was Director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich from 1976 to 1992.

#673

M. Madan Babu

#15995

Overall Influence

M. Madan Babu is an Indian-American computational biologist and bioinformatician. He is the endowed chair in biological data science and director of the center of excellence for data-driven discovery at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Previously, he served as a programme leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology .

#674

Henry Stommel

#8862

Overall Influence

1920 - 1992 (72 years)

Henry Melson Stommel was a major contributor to the field of physical oceanography. Beginning in the 1940s, he advanced theories about global ocean circulation patterns and the behavior of the Gulf Stream that form the basis of physical oceanography today. Widely recognized as one of the most influential and productive oceanographers of his time, Stommel was both a groundbreaking theoretician and an astute, seagoing observer.

#675

Matthew Kaufman

#15128

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

Matthew H. Kaufman was a British biologist. He was Professor Emeritus at University of Edinburgh having been Professor of Anatomy there from 1985 to 2007. He taught anatomy and embryology for more than 30 years, initially at the University of Cambridge, when he was a Fellow of King's College, and more recently in Edinburgh.

#676

Alan Hastings

#19642

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alan Matthew Hastings is a mathematical ecologist and distinguished professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. In 2005 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2006 he won the Robert H. MacArthur Award.

#677

Tim Flannery

#2965

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Timothy Fridtjof Flannery is an Australian mammalogist, palaeontologist, environmentalist, conservationist, explorer, author, science communicator, activist and public scientist. He was awarded Australian of the Year in 2007 for his work and advocacy on environmental issues.

#678

Randy Thornhill

Randy Thornhill

#6665

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Randy Thornhill is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist. He is a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and was president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society from 2011 to 2013. He is known for his evolutionary explanation of rape as well as his work on insect mating systems and the parasite-stress theory.

#679

Fred Gage

#20771

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Fred "Rusty" Gage is an American geneticist known for his discovery of stem cells in the adult human brain. Gage is a former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he holds the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease and works in the Laboratory of Genetics.

#680

Alex Bateman

#22865

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Alexander George Bateman is a computational biologist and Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute , part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge, UK. He has led the development of the Pfam biological database and introduced the Rfam database of RNA families. He has also been involved in the use of Wikipedia for community-based annotation of biological databases.

#681

George Klein

#21983

Overall Influence

1925 - 2016 (91 years)

George Klein was a Hungarian–Swedish microbiologist and public intellectual. Specializing in cancer research, he was professor of tumour biology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm from 1957 to 1992, a chair created for him, and as professor emeritus continued to work as research group leader in the microbiology and tumor biology center. According to Nature, the department Klein founded was "international and influential". In the 1960s he and his wife, Eva Klein, "laid the foundation for modern tumour immunology".

#682

Nina Fedoroff

#16105

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Nina Vsevolod Fedoroff is an American molecular biologist known for her research in life sciences and biotechnology, especially transposable elements or jumping genes. and plant stress response. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded her the National Medal of Science, she is also a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology.

#683

Lourdes J. Cruz

Lourdes J. Cruz

#21384

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Lourdes J. Cruz is a Filipino biochemist whose research has contributed to the understanding of the biochemistry of toxic peptides from the venom of fish-hunting Conus marine snails. Throughout the Philippines, she is known as the Sea Snail Venom Specialist. The characterization of over 50 biologically active peptides from the snail's venom had been made possible, in part, by her studies. Scientific findings regarding the peptides found in snails have applications in diagnostic tools for cancers and the development of drugs for the treatment of neurological disorders. She has also contributed to the development of conotoxins as tools for examining the activity of the human brain.

#684

Masao Ito

#18781

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

was a Japanese neuroscientist, and director of the Riken Brain Science Institute. Overviews Masao Ito was the main force behind Japanese neuroscience and its international recognition for many years. He was very active in the International Brain Research Organisation and went on to establish the Federation of Asian-Oceanian Neuroscience Societies in an effort to join together East Asian neuroscientists and facilitate interactions without dependence on American/European influences. This organisation is still active and acts in concert with IBRO's own Asia-Pacific Regional Committee which was set up in 1999.

#685

Horace Barker

#19181

Overall Influence

1907 - 2000 (93 years)

Horace Albert "Nook" Barker was an American biochemist and microbiologist who studied the operation of biological and chemical processes in plants, humans and other animals, including using radioactive tracers to determine the role enzymes play in synthesizing sucrose. He was recognized with the National Medal of Science for his role in identifying an active form of Vitamin B12.

#686

Wallace Smith Broecker

Wallace Smith Broecker

#9359

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Wallace "Wally" Smith Broecker was an American geochemist. He was the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and a sustainability fellow at Arizona State University. He developed the idea of a global "conveyor belt" linking the circulation of the global ocean and made major contributions to the science of the carbon cycle and the use of chemical tracers and isotope dating in oceanography. Broecker popularized the term "global warming". He received the Crafoord Prize and the Vet...

#687

Howard Ensign Evans

Howard Ensign Evans

#22300

Overall Influence

1919 - 2002 (83 years)

Howard Ensign Evans was an American entomologist who was a specialist on wasps. He was also the author of several popular works on entomology including Life on a Little-known Planet , The Pleasures of Entomology and Wasp Farm .

#688

Juan Rosai

#8639

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Juan Rosai was an Italian-born American physician who contributed to clinical research and education in the specialty of surgical pathology. He was the principal author and editor of a major textbook in that field, and he characterized novel medical conditions such as Rosai-Dorfman disease and the desmoplastic small round cell tumor. Rosai is also well-known because of his role as teacher, mentor and consultant to many American and international surgical pathologists.

#689

Thomas Lovejoy

#10379

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

Thomas Eugene Lovejoy III was an American ecologist who was President of the Amazon Biodiversity Center, a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and a university professor in the Environmental Science and Policy department at George Mason University. Lovejoy was the World Bank's chief biodiversity advisor and the lead specialist for environment for Latin America and the Caribbean as well as senior advisor to the president of the United Nations Foundation. In 2008, he also was the first Biodiversity Chair of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment to 2013.

#690

Allen Frances

#1781

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Allen J. Frances is an American psychiatrist. He is currently Professor and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He is best known for serving as chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force overseeing the development and revision of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . Frances is the founding editor of two well-known psychiatric journals: the Journal of Personality Disorders and the Journal of Psychiatric Practice.

#691

Stephen J. O'Brien

Stephen J. O'Brien

#21469

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Stephen J. O'Brien is an American geneticist. He is known for his research contributions in comparative genomics, virology, genetic epidemiology, mammalian systematics and species conservation. Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Author or co-author of over 850 scientific articles and the editor of fourteen volumes.

#692

Adrian Bird

#13687

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sir Adrian Peter Bird, is a British geneticist and Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. Bird has spent much of his academic career in Edinburgh, from receiving his PhD in 1970 to working at the MRC Mammalian Genome Unit and later serving as director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology. His research focuses on understanding DNA methylation and CpG islands, and their role in diseases such as Rett syndrome.

#693

Gail R. Martin

#16660

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Gail Roberta Martin is an American biologist. She is professor emerita in the Department of Anatomy, University of California, San Francisco. She is known for her pioneering work on the isolation of pluripotent stem cells from normal embryos, for which she coined the term ‘embryonic stem cells’. She is also widely recognized for her work on the function of Fibroblast Growth Factors and their negative regulators in vertebrate organogenesis. She and her colleagues also made valuable contributions to gene targeting technology.

#694

Nancy Knowlton

#21871

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Nancy Knowlton is a coral reef biologist and a former Sant Chair for Marine Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Life She graduated from Harvard University, and from the University of California, Berkeley, with a PhD. She was a professor at Yale University, then joined the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

#695

David Julius

#11162

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

David Jay Julius is an American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on molecular mechanisms of pain sensation and heat, including the characterization of the TRPV1 and TRPM8 receptors that detect capsaicin, menthol, and temperature. He is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

#696

Ingo Potrykus

#18143

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Ingo Potrykus is Professor Emeritus of Plant Sciences at the Institute of Plant Sciences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology , Zurich from which he retired in 1999. His research group applied gene technology to contribute to food security in developing countries. Together with Peter Beyer, he is one of the co-inventors of golden rice. In 2014 he was chairman of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board.

#697

Edwin H. Colbert

Edwin H. Colbert

#18462

Overall Influence

1905 - 2001 (96 years)

Edwin Harris "Ned" Colbert was a distinguished American vertebrate paleontologist and prolific researcher and author. Born in Clarinda, Iowa, he grew up in Maryville, Missouri and graduated from Maryville High School. His father was George H. Colbert who was head of the mathematics department at Northwest Missouri State University and had been at the college since its founding in 1906.

#698

Jon Kaas

#16129

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jon Kaas is a professor at Vanderbilt University and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He has made discoveries about the organization of the mammalian brain, including the description of many areas of the cerebral cortex and their neuroplasticity.

#699

Alexander Kellner

Alexander Kellner

#8585

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Alexander Wilhelm Armin Kellner is a Brazilian geologist and paleontologist who is a leading expert in the field of studying pterosaurs. His research has focused mainly on fossil reptiles from the Cretaceous Period, including extinct dinosaurs and crocodylomorphs.

#700

David J. Lipman

David J. Lipman

#13034

Overall Influence

David J. Lipman is an American biologist who from 1989 to 2017 was the director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health. NCBI is the home of GenBank, the U.S. node of the International Sequence Database Consortium, and PubMed, one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. Lipman is one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program, and a respected figure in bioinformatics. In 2017, he left NCBI and became Chief Science Officer at Impossible Foods.

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