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.

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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#6501

Scott Powers

#100681

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Scott Powers is an American physiologist, focusing on investigating the effects of muscular exercise and inactivity on both cardiac and skeletal muscle. He is currently the UAA Endowed Professor at University of Florida.

#6502

Gisela Storz

#108279

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Gisela Storz is a microbiologist at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health . She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

#6503

Joakim Dillner

#114045

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

#6504

Andreas R. Rosenwald

#114046

Overall Influence

#6505

Andrzej Lesicki

#59552

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Andrzej Lesicki is a Polish biologist, zoologist, malacologist and a professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań , in Poland. Between 2008 and 2016 he was Vice-President of AMU responsible for human resources and development and is now AMU's Rector for the term of office from 2016 until 2020.

#6506

D. W. K. Boulter

#114078

Overall Influence

#6507

Adriaan Kortlandt

Adriaan Kortlandt

#56005

Overall Influence

1918 - 2009 (91 years)

Prof. Dr. Adriaan Kortlandt was a Dutch ethologist. He has been described together with Vernon Reynolds and Jane Goodall as "...one of a trio of pioneers ... who founded field studies of chimpanzees in the 1960s."

#6508

Samuel Wooster James

#107599

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Samuel James is an American scientist, a researcher specializing in evolutionary biology, focusing on earthworm taxonomy. James, with fellow researchers, has discovered numerous species of annelids, including Diplocardia californiana, Diplocardia woodi, Diplocardia montana, and a new species related to the Giant Palouse earthworm.

#6509

Dario Neri

#114102

Overall Influence

#6510

Richard G. W. Anderson

#114140

Overall Influence

#6511

James L. Patton

James L. Patton

#104759

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

James Lloyd Patton , is an American evolutionary biologist and mammalogist. He is emeritus professor of integrative biology and curator of mammals at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley and has made extensive contributions to the systematics and biogeography of several vertebrate taxa, especially small mammals .

#6512

Lúcia Mendonça Previato

#67355

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Lúcia Mendonça Previato is a Brazilian biologist. She was awarded the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2004 for her research into preventing Chagas disease. Biography Lucia Mendonça Previato was born in 1949, in Maceió, Brazil and moved with her family to Rio de Janeiro when she was 5 years old. She graduated from Universidade Santa Úrsula in 1971 and obtained her Doctorate from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Microbiology and Immunology in 1976.

#6513

Liu Dajun

#42087

Overall Influence

1926 - 2016 (90 years)

Liu Dajun was a Chinese agronomist, educator and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering . Biography Liu graduated from University of Nanking in 1949, majoring in agronomy. He became a teaching assistant at University of Nanking. He moved to Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy by government study abroad scholarship in 1955 and earned his master's degree in 1959. Liu returned to China and taught at Nanjing Agricultural University. His research area was wheat genetics and breeding. He was the President of Nanjing Agricultural University between 1983 and 1991. He was elected an a...

#6514

Alan J. Mccomas

#114166

Overall Influence

#6515

Ann T. Bowling

#97028

Overall Influence

1943 - 2000 (57 years)

Ann Trommershausen Bowling was an American scientist who was one of the world's leading geneticists in the study of horses, conducting research in the areas of molecular genetics and cytogenetics. She was a major figure in the development of testing to determine animal parentage, first with blood typing in the 1980s and then DNA testing in the 1990s. She later became known for her studies of hereditary diseases in horses and equine coat color genetics, as well as research on horse evolution and the development of horse breeds. She studied the population genetics of feral horses, did conside...

#6516

Emad Alnemri

#114178

Overall Influence

Emad Saleem Alnemri is a professor in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Thomas Jefferson University, researching apoptosis and the inflammasome. Alnemri's group discovered many of the caspases involved in apoptosis. He also discovered that a mutation in the mitochondrial serine protease Omi causes neurodegeneration.

#6517

Judy Lieberman

#74478

Overall Influence

Judy Lieberman is a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and holds an endowed chair in cellular and molecular medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. Early life Judy Lieberman was born in September 1947, in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in New Jersey with her parents and two sisters Phyllis and Donna.

#6518

Bertram Sacktor

#114194

Overall Influence

#6519

James S. Clegg

#107703

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

James Standish Clegg is a Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry at University of California, Davis, based at the Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute in Bodega Bay, California. He served as director of the Bodega Marine Laboratory from 1986 to 1999 and as president of the National Association Marine Laboratories from 1991 to 1993.

#6520

Edwin O'Neill Willis

#55952

Overall Influence

1935 - 2015 (80 years)

Edwin O'Neill Willis was an American ornithologist who studied the birds of Central and South America. Biography Willis was born on 18 January 1935, the son of Andrew Nelson Willis and Verna Fleming. He was raised on a farm in Russellville, Alabama.

#6521

Peter F. Hall

#114198

Overall Influence

#6522

Jan Vymazal

#114210

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

#6523

David L. Kirchman

#114218

Overall Influence

#6524

Jiro Kikkawa

#109048

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Professor was a Japanese Australian ornithologist. His early zoological studies were at Tokyo University, Japan and at Oxford University in England. He subsequently spent three years at the University of Otago in New Zealand where he began what was to become an enduring focus of research, the behavioural ecology of Silvereyes and other species of Zosterops.

#6525

David J. Adams

#114272

Overall Influence

#6526

Walter Timothy Lovenberg

#114281

Overall Influence

#6527

Patricia Hunt

#114291

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Patricia A. Hunt is Meyer Distinguished Professor in the School of Molecular Bioscience at Washington State University. Her primary research interest lies in human aneuploidy, mammalian germ cells and meiosis. She is best known for showing the adversary effect of Bisphenol A on the reproductive system of mammalians. In 2018, her team discovered that replacement Bisphenols also affects reproductive health, and this over generations.

#6528

Philipp Holliger

#97534

Overall Influence

Philipp Holliger is a Swiss molecular biologist best known for his work on xeno nucleic acids and RNA engineering. Holliger is a program leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology . Background He earned his degree in Natural Sciences from ETH Zürich, Switzerland, where he worked with Steven Benner, and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering in Cambridge under the mentorship of Sir Gregory Winter and Tim Richmond .

#6529

Martyn Rix

#89104

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Edward Martyn Rix is a British botanist, collector, horticulturist and author. Following completion of a PhD on Fritillaria at Cambridge University, he worked in Zurich, Switzerland and at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley. He is the author of many books and articles on plants and horticulture and is the editor of Curtis's Botanical Magazine, based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London.

#6530

Mark Kirkpatrick

#113383

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Mark A. Kirkpatrick is a theoretical population geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He currently holds the T. S. Painter Centennial Professorship in Genetics in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research touches on a wide variety of topics, including the evolution of sex chromosomes, sexual selection, and speciation. Kirkpatrick is the co-author, along with Douglas J. Futuyma, of a popular undergraduate evolution textbook. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

#6531

Stephen J. Giovannoni

#111700

Overall Influence

Stephen Joseph Giovannoni is an American microbiologist whose research mainly focuses on marine microbes. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Marine Science.

#6532

Ragnhild A. Lothe

#79854

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Ragnhild Adelheid Lothe is a Norwegian microbiologist and cancer researcher. She was born in Bergen, but grew up in Gjøvik. She studied mathematics, chemistry and biology at the University of Bergen and University of Oslo, graduating from the former with a master's thesis on microbiology written at the State Institute of Public Health. She took her PhD degree at the University of Oslo in 1992.

#6533

Adrian J. Dunn

#114359

Overall Influence

#6534

Mark Frederick Mccarty

#114362

Overall Influence

#6535

Herbert F. Polesky

#114373

Overall Influence

#6536

Gerald Allen Fishman

#114382

Overall Influence

#6537

Arlene Sharpe

#108222

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Arlene Helen Sharpe is an American immunologist and Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University and Chair of the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. In 2017, she received the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize with Gordon Freeman, Lieping Chen, James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their collective contributions to the pre-clinical foundation and development of immune checkpoint blockade, a novel form of cancer therapy that has transformed the landscape of cancer treatment. She served as the hundredth president of the American Association of Immunologists from 2016 to 2017 and served as an AAI Council member from 2013 to 2016.

#6538

Brent Stockwell

#107999

Overall Influence

Brent Roark Stockwell is an American chemical biologist. He is a Professor of Biological Sciences and Chemistry at Columbia University. In 2012, Stockwell and Scott Dixon coined the term ferroptosis and described several of its key features.

#6539

Jonathan Chapman

Jonathan Chapman

#77382

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Jonathan Chapman is Professor and Director of Doctoral Studies in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. His research tackles our throwaway society by developing design strategies for longer-lasting products, materials and user experiences – an approach he calls, emotionally durable design.

#6540

Alfred F. Michael

#114398

Overall Influence

#6541

Gordon Orians

#113252

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Gordon Howell Orians is an American ornithologist and ecologist. He was the 1999 recipient of the Cooper Ornithological Society’s Loye and Alden Miller Research Award, which is given in recognition of lifetime achievement in ornithological research. He received the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America in 1998.

#6542

Jean Thomas

#84967

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Dame Jean Olwen Thomas, is a Welsh biochemist, former Master of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and Chancellor of Swansea University. Early life and education Thomas was born in Treboeth, Swansea to John Robert and Lorna Thomas, and she attended Llwyn-y-Bryn High School for Girls. She continued her education at University College of Swansea where she received a first class Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1964 followed by a PhD in 1967. Her thesis was on Hydroxyl-carbonyl interaction in cyclic peptides and depsipeptides.

#6543

Paul L. Kaufman

#114412

Overall Influence

#6544

H. Peter Metzger

#114432

Overall Influence

#6545

J. Lawrence Fox

#114433

Overall Influence

#6546

Francisco Xavier Malcata

#114436

Overall Influence

#6547

Abdullah Sener

#114439

Overall Influence

#6548

Matt Keeling

#105111

Overall Influence

Matthew James Keeling is a professor in the Mathematics Institute and the School of Life Sciences of the University of Warwick. He has been editor of the journal Epidemics since 2007. Keeling was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to SAGE during the Covid-19 response.

#6549

Kanta Subbarao

#99409

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Kanta Subbarao is an Indian virologist, molecular geneticist, and physician-scientist. She is director of the World Health Organization collaborating centre for reference and research on influenza. Subbarao is also a professor at the Doherty Institute.

#6550

Padmanee Sharma

#114466

Overall Influence

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