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,
#751
Terence McKenna
#2530
Overall Influence
1946 - 2000 (54 years)
Terence Kemp McKenna was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, ethnomycology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture".
Go to Profile#752
Gilbert Chu
#9526
Overall Influence
Gilbert Chu is an American biochemist. He is a Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at the Stanford Medical School. Biography Chu graduated from Garden City High School in New York in 1963. He received a B.A. in physics from Princeton University in 1967, a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T. in 1973, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1980.
Go to Profile#753
Stephen C. Harrison
#17544
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Stephen C. Harrison is professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, professor of pediatrics, and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics of Harvard Medical School, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Go to Profile#754
Ulrich Kutschera
#19987
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ulrich Kutschera is a former German professor of biology who works as an academic advisor at I-Cultiver, Inc. in San Francisco and as a visiting scientist in Stanford/Palo Alto, California, US. He is the founder and head of "AK Evolutionbiologie", an association of evolutionary biologists in Germany. Starting in the 2000s, Kutschera started engaging with the public, first as a critic of creationism and intelligent design. Since the mid-2010s, his public statements and popular books focused on climate skepticism and criticism of gender studies.
Go to Profile#755
Hans Tuppy
#15548
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Hans Tuppy is an Austrian biochemist who participated in the sequencing of insulin, and became Austria's first university professor for biochemistry. He was Austrian Minister for Science and Research from 1987 to 1989.
Go to Profile#756
Alan Grafen
#14907
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Alan Grafen is a Scottish ethologist and evolutionary biologist. He currently teaches and undertakes research at St John's College, Oxford. Along with regular contributions to scientific journals, Grafen is known publicly for his work as co-editor of the 2006 festschrift Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, honouring the achievements of his colleague and former academic advisor. He has worked extensively in the field of biological game theory, and, in 1990, devised a model showing that Zahavi's well-known handicap principle could theoretically exist in natural populatio...
Go to Profile#757
Patrick Cramer
#15659
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Patrick Cramer is a German chemist, structural biologist, and molecular systems biologist. In 2020, he was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. He became president of the Max Planck Society in June 2023.
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Martin Cline
#14782
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Martin J. Cline is an American geneticist who is the Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles . He did postdoctoral training in hematology-oncology at the University of Utah and was at the University of California, San Francisco before going to UCLA. His research has been in cell biology, molecular biology, and genetics.
Go to Profile#759
Howard Cedar
#13121
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Howard Chaim Cedar is an Israeli American biochemist who works on DNA methylation, a mechanism that turns genes on and off. Biography Howard Chaim Cedar was born in the United States. He received a bachelor's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, in 1970, received an M.D. and a PhD from New York University. He is married to Zipora, a psychodramatist, and has six children, Joseph , Dahlia, Noa, Yoav, Yonatan and Daniel, and 24 grandchildren.
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C. David Marsden
#24890
Overall Influence
1938 - 1998 (60 years)
David Marsden , FRS was a British neurologist who made a significant contribution to the field of movement disorders. He was described as ‘arguably the leading academic neurologist and neuroscientist of his generation in the UK’.
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Viktor Frankl
#254
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories.
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Philippe Sansonetti
#25961
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Philippe J. Sansonetti is a French microbiologist, professor at the Pasteur Institute and the Collège de France in Paris. He is the director of the Inserm Unit 786 and of the Institut Pasteur laboratory Pathogénie Microbienne Moléculaire.
Go to Profile#763
Michel C. Nussenzweig
#21364
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michel C. Nussenzweig is a professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology at The Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is a member of both the US National Academy of Medicine and the US National Academy of Sciences.
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Michael Merzenich
#8813
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Matthias Merzenich is an American neuroscientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He took the sensory cortex maps developed by his predecessors and refined them using dense micro-electrode mapping techniques. Using this, he definitively showed there to be multiple somatotopic maps of the body in the postcentral sulcus, and multiple tonotopic maps of the acoustic inputs in the superior temporal plane.
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Michael S. Engel
#18494
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Michael S. Engel, FLS, FRES is an American paleontologist and entomologist, notable for contributions to insect evolutionary biology and classification. In connection with his studies he has undertaken field expeditions in Central Asia, Asia Minor, the Levant, Arabia, eastern Africa, the high Arctic, and South and North America, and has published more than 925 papers in scientific journals and over 1000 new living and fossil species. Some of Engel's research images were included in exhibitions on the aesthetic value of scientific imagery.
Go to Profile#766
Ab Osterhaus
#16635
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Albertus Dominicus Marcellinus Erasmus "Ab" Osterhaus is a leading Dutch virologist and influenza expert. An Emeritus Professor of Virology at Erasmus University Rotterdam since 1993, Osterhaus is known throughout the world for his work on SARS and H5N1, the pathogen that causes avian influenza.
Go to Profile#767
Nick Barton
#19920
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Nicholas Hamilton Barton is a British evolutionary biologist. Education Barton was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge where he graduated with a first-class degree in Biological Sciences in 1976 and gained his PhD supervised by Godfrey Hewitt at the University of East Anglia in 1979.
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Bruce Wallace
#23004
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Bruce Wallace was an American scientist. He was University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. Biography Wallace was born and raised in McKean, Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor's degree in zoology from Columbia University before joining the United States Army. He served as a statistical control officer under Robert McNamara before returning to Columbia to earn his doctoral degree in 1949, studying under Theodosius Dobzhansky. He joined the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1947 and was promoted to its assistant director. In 1958, he joined the facult...
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Peter G. Schultz
#10361
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#770
Norman D. Newell
#16201
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Norman Dennis Newell was a professor of geology at Columbia University, and chairman and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Biography Newell was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Virgil Bingham and Nellie Newell. Shortly after he was born, his family moved to Kansas. Newell's father encouraged his early interest in geology from a young age, often taking him to fossil deposits located in Kansas and Colorado. In 1929, at the age of 20, Newell received his B.S. degree from the University of Kansas, and his M.A. degree in 1931. He received his Ph.D.
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Alan Aderem
#24863
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Alan Aderem is an American biologist, specializing in immunology and cell biology. Aderem's particular focus is the innate immune system, the part of the immune system that responds generically to pathogens. His laboratory's research focuses on diseases afflicting citizens of resource poor countries, including AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and influenza.
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Nick Lane
#18255
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Nick Lane is a British biochemist and writer. He is a professor in evolutionary biochemistry at University College London. He has published five books to date which have won several awards. Career Educated at Imperial College, London, he earned his PhD at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School in 1995 with a thesis entitled In vivo studies of ischaemia-reperfusion injury in hypothermically stored rabbit renal autograft. He then worked as Medical Writer at Oxford Clinical Communications for a year before joining Medi Cine International a medical multimedia company, also as a writer. In 1999 he...
Go to Profile#773
David Baker
#14212
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
David Baker is an American biochemist and computational biologist who has pioneered methods to predict and design the three-dimensional structures of proteins. He is the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry and an adjunct professor of genome sciences, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and physics at the University of Washington. He serves as the director of the Rosetta Commons, a consortium of labs and researchers that develop biomolecular structure prediction and design software. The problem of protein structure prediction to which Baker has contributed significantly has now been largely solved by DeepMind using artificial intelligence.
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Theodore Puck
#13306
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Theodore Thomas Puck was an American geneticist born in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Chicago public schools and obtained his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degree from the University of Chicago. His PhD work was on the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom and his doctoral adviser was James Franck. During WW II Puck stayed at the University of Chicago. There he worked in the laboratory of Oswald H. Robertson on the study of how bacteria and viruses can spread through the air and on dust particles. After a postdoc position in the laboratory of Renato Dulbecco, Puck was recr...
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Robin Holliday
#10187
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Robin Holliday was a British molecular biologist. Holliday described a mechanism of DNA-strand exchange that attempted to explain gene-conversion events that occur during meiosis in fungi. That model first proposed in 1964 and is now known as the Holliday Junction.
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F. Peter Guengerich
#27490
Overall Influence
Frederick Peter Guengerich is a professor of biochemistry and the director of the Center in Molecular Toxicology at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Guengerich is the author or co-author of over 500 peer-reviewed scientific articles, and a researcher in toxicology working on cytochromes P450, DNA damage and carcinogenesis, and drug metabolism. In 2005 he received the William C. Rose Award for his research.
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Miklos Udvardy
#23577
Overall Influence
1919 - 1998 (79 years)
Miklos Dezso Ferenc Udvardy was a Hungarian-born Canadian biologist and professor at the University of British Columbia. He made significant contributions to various fields, including biogeography, evolutionary biology, ornithology, and vegetation classification. Udvardy published 191 papers and books including an influential text on zoogeography.
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Herbert Andrewartha
#27096
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Professor Herbert George Andrewartha, BS , MAgSc , DSc , FAA, was a distinguished Australian research scientist in the fields of entomology, biology, zoology and animal ecology. Early life Andrewartha was born the second of three children, on 21 December 1907 in Perth, Western Australia to George and Elsie. His father was a teacher, and the family moved frequently from school to school with the education department, in rural Western Australia.
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Kate Adamala
#23394
Overall Influence
Katarzyna P Adamala is an American synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota. Research Adamala's work includes contributions to the field of astrobiology, synthetic cell engineering and biocomputing.
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Steve Jones
#12205
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John Stephen Jones DSC FLSW is a British geneticist and from 1995 to 1999 and 2008 to June 2010 was Head of the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. His studies are conducted in the Galton Laboratory.
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Bernard Roizman
#21144
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Bernard Roizman is an American scientist born in Romania. He is the Joseph Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Virology in the Departments of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago.
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Russell Ross
#25775
Overall Influence
1929 - 1999 (70 years)
Russell Ross was an American professor of pathology, known for research on the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. Education and career Russell Ross grew up in Jacksonville, Florida and graduated from Cornell University in 1951 before earning a degree in dentistry from Columbia University College of Dental Medicine in 1955. In 1958 he became a doctoral student and received a PhD in experimental pathology from the University of Washington at Seattle in 1962. At the University of Washington at Seattle, Dr. Ross joined the faculty of the University of Washington School of Medicine and was appointed Professor of Pathology in 1969.
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C. Robert Cloninger
#8875
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Claude Robert Cloninger is an American psychiatrist and geneticist noted for his research on the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual foundation of both mental health and mental illness. He previously held the Wallace Renard Professorship of Psychiatry, and served as professor of psychology and genetics, as well as director of the Sansone Family Center for Well-Being at Washington University in St. Louis. Cloninger is a member of the evolutionary, neuroscience, and statistical genetics programs of the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences at Washington University, and is rec...
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Shimon Sakaguchi
#13922
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Shimon Sakaguchi is an immunologist and a Distinguished Professor of Osaka University. He is best known for the discovery of regulatory T cells and to describe their role in the immune system. This discovery is used in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases.
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David Haig
#14121
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David Addison Haig is an Australian evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and professor in Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He is interested in intragenomic conflict, genomic imprinting and parent–offspring conflict, and wrote the book Genomic Imprinting and Kinship. His major contribution to the field of evolutionary theory is the kinship theory of genomic imprinting.
Go to Profile#786
Joseph Henrich
#6744
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Joseph Henrich is an American professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Before arriving at Harvard, Henrich was a professor of psychology and economics at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture shaped our species' genetic evolution.
Go to Profile#787
Brian Matthews
#20688
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Brian W. Matthews is a biochemist and biophysicist educated at the University of Adelaide, contributor to x-ray crystallographic methodology at the University of Cambridge, and since 1970 at the University of Oregon as Professor of Physics and HHMI investigator in the Institute of Molecular Biology.
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Paul Johnsgard
#21283
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Paul Austin Johnsgard was an ornithologist, artist and emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska. His works include nearly fifty books including several monographs, principally about the waterfowl and cranes.
Go to Profile#789
Gerd Jürgens
#22848
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Gerd Jürgens is a plant developmental biologist and emeritus Director of the Cell Biology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and Head of the Center for Plant Molecular Biology at the Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen. He has published extensively in leading journals, including eight papers in the journal Nature as well as various articles in the journals Cell, Science, Journal of Cell Biology and The Plant Journal.
Go to Profile#790
Patricia Schulte
#23415
Overall Influence
Patricia M. Schulte is a Canadian zoologist who is a Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Her research considers physiology, genomics and population genetics. Schulte is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the former President of the Canadian Society of Zoologists.
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Titia de Lange
#19714
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Titia de Lange is the Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research, the Leon Hess professor and the head of Laboratory Cell Biology and Genetics at Rockefeller University. De Lange obtained her Masters on "Chromatin structure of the human β-globin gene locus" at the University of Amsterdam in 1981, and subsequently her PhD at the same institution in 1985 with Piet Borst on surface antigen genes in trypanosomes. In 1985 she joined Harold Varmus's lab at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 1990 she has had a faculty position at the Rockefeller University. In 2011, de Lange received the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science.
Go to Profile#792
Hans Clevers
#19973
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Johannes Carolus Clevers is a Dutch molecular geneticist, cell biologist and stem cell researcher. He became the Head of Pharma, Research and Early Development, and a member of the Corporate Executive Committee, of the Swiss healthcare company Roche in 2022. Previously, he headed a research group at the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research and at the ; he remained as an advisor and guest scientist or visiting researcher to both groups. He is also a Professor in Molecular Genetics at the University of Utrecht.
Go to Profile#793
Zachary Lippman
#18073
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Zachary B. Lippman is an American plant biologist and the Jacob Goldfield Professor of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Lippman has used gene editing technology to investigate the control of fruit production in various crops. In 2019 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2020 he received the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences.
Go to Profile#794
Jonathan K. Pritchard
#16390
Overall Influence
Jonathan Karl Pritchard is an English-born professor of genetics at Stanford University, best known for his development of the STRUCTURE algorithm for studying population structure and his work on human genetic variation and evolution. His research interests lie in the study of human evolution, in particular in understanding the association between genetic variation among human individuals and human traits.
Go to Profile#795
Clay Armstrong
#19826
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Clay Margrave Armstrong is an American physiologist and a former student of Andrew Fielding Huxley. Armstrong received his MD from Washington University School of Medicine in 1960. He is currently emeritus professor of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also held professorial appointments at Duke University and the University of Rochester.
Go to Profile#796
Vernon Ingram
#17638
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Vernon Martin Ingram, was a German–American professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biography Ingram was born in Breslau as Werner Adolf Martin Immerwahr, Lower Silesia. When he was 14, he and his family left Nazi Germany because of their opposition to Nazism and settled in England. He then Anglicised his name to Vernon Ingram.
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John C. Sanford
#21917
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John C. Sanford is an American geneticist and inventor. From 1980 to 1998 he was a professor at Cornell University. After retirement at Cornell, he continued as courtesy professor. He is known for advocacy of the pseudoscience of intelligent design.
Go to Profile#798
Michael Rosenzweig
#22323
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Michael L. Rosenzweig is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona who has developed and popularized the concept of Reconciliation ecology. He received his Ph.D in zoology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and has gone on to hold a number of positions around the United States.
Go to Profile#799
Seymour S. Kety
#18435
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Seymour S. Kety was an American neuroscientist who was credited with making modern psychiatry a rigorous and heuristic branch of medicine by applying basic science to the study of human behavior in health and disease. After Kety died, his colleague Louis Sokoloff noted that: "He discovered a method for measuring blood flow in the brain, was the first scientific director of the National Institute of Mental Health and produced the most-definitive evidence for the essential involvement of genetic factors in schizophrenia."
Go to Profile#800
Gunnar von Heijne
#18337
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Professor Nils Gunnar Hansson von Heijne, born 10 June 1951 in Gothenburg, is a Swedish scientist working on signal peptides, membrane proteins and bioinformatics at the Stockholm Center for Biomembrane Research at Stockholm University.
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