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,
#801
Patricia Goldman-Rakic
#17011
Overall Influence
1937 - 2003 (66 years)
Patricia Goldman-Rakic was an American professor of neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry and psychology at Yale University School of Medicine. She pioneered multidisciplinary research of the prefrontal cortex and working memory.
Go to Profile#802
Storrs L. Olson
#17233
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Storrs Lovejoy Olson was an American biologist and ornithologist who spent his career at the Smithsonian Institution, retiring in 2008. One of the world's foremost avian paleontologists, he was best known for his studies of fossil and subfossil birds on islands such as Ascension, St. Helena and Hawaii. His early higher education took place at Florida State University in 1966, where he obtained a B.A. in biology, and the University of Florida, where he received an M.S. in biology. Olson's doctoral studies took place at Johns Hopkins University, in what was then the School of Hygiene and Public Health.
Go to Profile#803
Benjamin Libet
#5872
Overall Influence
1916 - 2007 (91 years)
Benjamin Libet was an American neuroscientist who was a pioneer in the field of human consciousness. Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco. In 2003, he was the first recipient of the Virtual Nobel Prize in Psychology from the University of Klagenfurt, "for his pioneering achievements in the experimental investigation of consciousness, initiation of action, and free will".
Go to Profile#804
Carla J. Shatz
#19285
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Carla J. Shatz is an American neurobiologist and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#805
Tsuneko Okazaki
#11704
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Tsuneko Okazaki is a Japanese pioneer of molecular biology known for her work on DNA replication and specifically for discovering Okazaki fragments, along with her husband Reiji. Dr. Tsuneko Okazaki has continued to be involved in academia, contributing to more advancements in DNA research.
Go to Profile#806
Nikos Logothetis
#12060
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nikos K. Logothetis is a Greek biologist and neuroscientist. Logothetis studies visual perception and object recognition; he is well-known for his work demonstrating that BOLD fMRI data is related to neuronal activity. Logothetis directed the department of Physiology of Cognitive Processes at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen from 1996 to 2020. He will co-direct the International Center for Primate Brain Research in Shanghai beginning in late 2020 or early 2021.
Go to Profile#807
Thomas Tuschl
#19730
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Thomas Tuschl is a German biochemist and molecular biologist, known for his research on RNA. Biography Tuschl was born in Altdorf bei Nürnberg. After graduating in Chemistry from Regensburg University, Tuschl received his PhD in 1995 from the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen. He spent four years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA.
Go to Profile#808
Richard M. Bohart
#26942
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Richard Mitchell Bohart was an American entomologist, university professor, and a member of the University of California, Davis Department of Entomology for more than 50 years. He taught courses in general entomology, insect systematics, and summer field courses in insect identification. From 1963 to 1967 he served as chair of the Department of Entomology for the University of California at Davis.
Go to Profile#809
Eleanor Riley
#29256
Overall Influence
Eleanor Mary Riley was Director of the Roslin Institute, Dean of Research at the Royal School of Veterinary Studies, and professor of Immunology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focusses on understanding the immune response of the host to malaria and other diseases using human data and mouse models.
Go to Profile#810
Colin Pittendrigh
#13769
Overall Influence
1918 - 1996 (78 years)
Colin Stephenson Pittendrigh was a British-born biologist who spent most of his adult life in the United States. Pittendrigh is regarded as the "father of the biological clock," and founded the modern field of chronobiology alongside Jürgen Aschoff and Erwin Bünning. He is known for his careful descriptions of the properties of the circadian clock in Drosophila and other species, and providing the first formal models of how circadian rhythms entrain to local light-dark cycles.
Go to Profile#811
Yoshihiro Kawaoka
#17227
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Yoshihiro Kawaoka is a virologist specializing in the study of the influenza and Ebola viruses. He holds a professorship in virology in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and at the University of Tokyo, Japan.
Go to Profile#812
Arthur Kleinman
#1361
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Arthur Kleinman is a medical anthropologist and the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University. Kleinman is also the Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He earned his AB and MD from Stanford University and an M.A. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He completed his internship at the Yale University of Medicine, before completing his psychiatric residency in Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
Go to Profile#813
Ford Doolittle
#15554
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
W. Ford Doolittle is an evolutionary and molecular biologist. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is also the winner of the 2013 Herzberg Medal of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the 2017 Killam Prize.
Go to Profile#814
Patrick Aebischer
#3940
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Patrick Aebischer has been the president of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne from 17 March 2000 to 31 December 2016. He is also a professor in neuroscience and head of the Neurodegenerative Disease Laboratory at the EPFL.
Go to Profile#815
Mark Pagel
#15580
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Mark David Pagel FRS is an evolutionary biologist and professor. He heads the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading. He is known for comparative studies in evolutionary biology. In 1994, with his spouse, anthropologist Ruth Mace, Pagel pioneered the Comparative Method in Anthropology.
Go to Profile#816
Peter Sneath
#22329
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Peter Henry Andrews Sneath FRS, MD was a microbiologist who co-founded the field of numerical taxonomy, together with Robert R. Sokal. Sneath and Sokal wrote Principles of Numerical Taxonomy, revised in 1973 as Numerical Taxonomy. Sneath reviewed the state of numerical taxonomy in 1995 and wrote some autobiographical notes in 2010.
Go to Profile#817
Philip Siekevitz
#22798
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Philip Siekevitz was an American cell biologist who spent most of his career at Rockefeller University. He was involved in early studies of protein synthesis and trafficking, established purification techniques to facilitate study of the cell nucleus, worked with Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine winner George Palade on cell membrane dynamics, and published extensively on the subject of postsynaptic density.
Go to Profile#818
Van Rensselaer Potter
#6011
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Van Rensselaer Potter II was an American biochemist, oncologist, and bioethicist. Born in northeast South Dakota, Potter was professor of oncology at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for more than five decades.
Go to Profile#819
Benjamin Elazari Volcani
#13913
Overall Influence
1915 - 1999 (84 years)
Benjamin Elazari Volcani was an Israeli microbiologist who discovered life in the Dead Sea and pioneered biological silicon research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#820
Tom Blundell
#15224
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Sir Thomas Leon Blundell, is a British biochemist, structural biologist, and science administrator. He was a member of the team of Dorothy Hodgkin that solved in 1969 the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin. Blundell has made contributions to the structural biology of polypeptide hormones, growth factors, receptor activation, signal transduction, and DNA double-strand break repair, subjects important in cancer, tuberculosis, and familial diseases. He has developed software for protein modelling and understanding the effects of mutations on protein function, leading to new approaches to structure-guided and Fragment-based lead discovery.
Go to Profile#821
Thomas R. Insel
#8799
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Thomas Roland Insel is an American neuroscientist, psychiatrist, entrepreneur, and author who led the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 until November 2015. Prior to becoming Director of NIMH, he was the founding Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is best known for research on oxytocin and vasopressin, two peptide hormones implicated in complex social behaviors, such as parental care and attachment. He announced on Sept. 15, 2015, that he was resigning as the director of the NIMH to join the Life Science division of Google X .
Go to Profile#822
Antonio Lazcano
#16810
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Antonio Eusebio Lazcano Araujo Reyes is a Mexican biology researcher and professor of the School of Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. He has studied the origin and early evolution of life for more than 35 years.
Go to Profile#823
John Q. Trojanowski
#17231
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Quinn Trojanowski was an American academic research neuroscientist specializing in neurodegeneration. He and his partner, Virginia Man-Yee Lee, MBA, Ph.D., are noted for identifying the roles of three proteins in neurodegenerative diseases: tau in Alzheimer's disease, alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's disease, and TDP-43 in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and frontotemporal degeneration.
Go to Profile#824
David M. Raup
#18456
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
David M. Raup was a University of Chicago paleontologist. Raup studied the fossil record and the diversity of life on Earth. Raup contributed to the knowledge of extinction events along with his colleague Jack Sepkoski. They suggested that the extinction of dinosaurs 66 mya was part of a cycle of mass extinctions that may have occurred every 26 million years.
Go to Profile#825
Richard Losick
#25090
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Richard Marc Losick is an American molecular biologist. He is the Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology at Harvard University and a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is especially noted for his investigations of endospore formation in Gram positive organisms such as Bacillus subtilis.
Go to Profile#826
Norton Zinder
#22042
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Norton David Zinder was an American biologist famous for his discovery of genetic transduction. Zinder was born in New York City, received his A.B. from Columbia University in 1947, Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1952, and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1969. He led a lab at Rockefeller University until shortly before his death.
Go to Profile#827
Scott F. Gilbert
#6148
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Scott Frederick Gilbert is an American evolutionary developmental biologist and historian of biology. Scott Gilbert is the Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology at Swarthmore College and a Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Helsinki.
Go to Profile#828
Randolph M. Nesse
#5238
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Randolph Martin Nesse is an American physician, scientist and author who is notable for his role as a founder of the field of evolutionary medicine and evolutionary psychiatry. Education and career Nesse studied at Carleton College from 1966 to 1970. He went on to receive his M.D. at the University of Michigan Medical School in 1974 and carried out his medical residency at the same place. Nesse became an instructor in psychiatry at the University of Michigan in 1977 and became an assistant professor there in psychiatry in 1979. He became associate professor in psychiatry in 1985 and professor...
Go to Profile#829
John Ernest Randall
#21406
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
John Ernest "Jack" Randall was an American ichthyologist and a leading authority on coral reef fishes. Randall described over 800 species and authored 11 books and over 900 scientific papers and popular articles. He spent most of his career working in Hawaii. He died in April 2020 at the age of 95.
Go to Profile#830
Kenneth Kendler
#30098
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kenneth S. Kendler is an American psychiatrist best known for his pioneering research in psychiatric genetics, particularly the genetic causes of schizophrenia. Kendler is one of the highest cited psychiatry researchers. Between 1990 and 1998 he was the 2nd highest cited psychiatrist, and for the 1997–2007 decade he was ranked 4th by Thomson Reuters' Science Watch. He has authored over 1,200 papers and in 2016 his h-index was 126. Kendler's group was also noted for the replication of a study of Avshalom Caspi on the interaction of stressful life events and a serotonin transporter polymorphism...
Go to Profile#831
Semir Zeki
#15360
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Semir Zeki FMedSci FRS is a British and French neurobiologist who has specialised in studying the primate visual brain and more recently the neural correlates of affective states, such as the experience of love, desire and beauty that are generated by sensory inputs within the field of neuroesthetics. He was educated at University College London where he was Henry Head Research Fellow of the Royal Society before being appointed Professor of Neurobiology. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Neuroesthetics at UCL.
Go to Profile#832
Myrna Weissman
#18888
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Myrna Milgram Weissman is Diane Goldman Kemper Family Professor of Epidemiology in Psychiatry at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and Chief of the Division of Translational Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She is an epidemiologist known for her research on the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and psychiatric epidemiology, as it pertains to rates and risks of anxiety and mood disorders across generations. Among her many influential works are longitudinal studies of the impact of parental depress...
Go to Profile#833
George Church
#14589
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
George M. Church is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Board of Sponsors. He earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology and chemistry from Duke University. He went on to a graduate biochemistry program at Duke, but became so immersed in his lab work that he abandoned his other coursework and ended up getting withdrawn from the program. Undeterred, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#834
Jonathan Eisen
#19827
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jonathan Andrew Eisen is an American evolutionary biologist, currently working at University of California, Davis. His academic research is in the fields of evolutionary biology, genomics and microbiology and he is the academic editor-in-chief of the open access journal PLOS Biology.
Go to Profile#835
Jaroslav Flegr
#17444
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jaroslav Flegr is a Czech parasitologist, evolutionary biologist, and author of the book Frozen Evolution. He is professor of biology at the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Neuroendocrinology Letters.
Go to Profile#836
Arturo Casadevall
#28238
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Arturo Casadevall is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease research, with a focus on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function. He was elected a member ...
Go to Profile#837
Donald E. Ingber
#18832
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Donald E. Ingber is an American cell biologist and bioengineer. He is the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also a member of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Ac...
Go to Profile#838
Peter Hochachka
#27524
Overall Influence
1937 - 2002 (65 years)
Peter William Hochachka, was a Canadian professor and zoologist at the University of British Columbia . He is known for his foundational work in creating the new field of adaptational biochemistry, connecting metabolic biochemistry with comparative physiology.
Go to Profile#839
James Spudich
#21222
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
James A. Spudich is an American scientist and professor. He is the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Biochemistry and of Cardiovascular Disease at Stanford University and works on the molecular basis of muscle contraction. He was awarded the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 2012 with Michael Sheetz and Ronald Vale. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#840
Kenneth Holmes
#12872
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Kenneth Charles Holmes FRS was a British molecular biologist. He was born in Hammersmith, London. He was a former colleague of Rosalind Franklin at Birkbeck College with Aaron Klug and John Finch and moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge in 1962. From 1975 and 1976 he was acting Head of Outstation, EMBL Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory at DESY, Hamburg. He worked at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research as an "Emeritus Scientific Member".
Go to Profile#841
Bret Weinstein
#4737
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Bret Samuel Weinstein is an American podcaster, author, and former professor of evolutionary biology. He served on the faculty of Evergreen State College from 2002 until 2017, when he resigned in the aftermath of a series of campus protests about racial equity at Evergreen, which brought Weinstein to national attention. Along with his brother Eric Weinstein, he is considered part of the intellectual dark web. Weinstein has been criticized for making false statements about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines.
Go to Profile#842
Obaid Siddiqi
#11750
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Obaid Siddiqi FRS was an Indian National Research Professor and the Founder-Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research National Center for Biological Sciences. He made seminal contributions to the field of behavioural neurogenetics using the genetics and neurobiology of Drosophila.
Go to Profile#843
Dean H. Kenyon
#13286
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Dean H. Kenyon is Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Francisco State University, a young Earth creationist, and one of the instigators of the intelligent design movement. He is the author of Biochemical Predestination.
Go to Profile#844
Reinhard Jahn
#17352
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Reinhard Jahn is a German biophysicist and neurobiologist known for his studies of cellular membrane fusion. For these investigations, he has been honored with numerous awards, including the 2000 Leibniz Award. Jahn is currently Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and the President of the University of Göttingen in Göttingen, Germany.
Go to Profile#845
Helmut Sies
#31581
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Helmut Sies is a German physician, biochemist and university professor. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of hydrogen peroxide as a normal attribute of aerobic life in 1970, and he introduced the concept of Oxidative stress in 1985. He also worked on the biological strategies of antioxidant defense and the biochemistry of nutritional antioxidants .
Go to Profile#846
Masakazu Konishi
#23092
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Masakazu "Mark" Konishi was a Japanese neurobiologist, known for his research on the neuroscience underlying the behavior of owls and songbirds. Early life and education Konishi was born on 17 February 1933 in Kyoto, Japan, the only child of poor "Nishijin" weavers. As a child during the Second World War, he grew edible plants in his family's backyard and rooftop, and raised rabbits for food. In his spare time, he enjoyed playing with animals, including insects, fish, birds, rabbits, and dogs.
Go to Profile#847
James Mallet
#28052
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
James Mallet is an evolutionary zoologist specialising in entomology. He was educated at Winchester College. He became professor of biological diversity at the Department of Biology, University College London. He was co-director of the Centre for Ecology and Evolution, a centre of excellence in research and teaching formed by University College London, the Institute of Zoology , Natural History Museum, Imperial College, Queen Mary, Royal Holloway and Kew Gardens. In 2013 he was distinguished lecturer on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research has included wor...
Go to Profile#848
Arthur L. Horwich
#17187
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Arthur L. Horwich is an American biologist and Sterling Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. Horwich has also been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1990. His research into protein folding uncovered the action of chaperonins, protein complexes that assist the folding of other proteins; Horwich first published this work in 1989.
Go to Profile#849
Eckard Wimmer
#19223
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Eckard Wimmer is a German American virologist, organic chemist and distinguished professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University. He is best known for his seminal work on the molecular biology of poliovirus and the first chemical synthesis of a viral genome capable of infection and subsequent production of live viruses.
Go to Profile#850
Richard Hynes
#29077
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard Olding Hynes is a British biologist, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His research focuses on cell adhesion and the interactions between cells and the extracellular matrix, with a particular interest in understanding molecular mechanisms of cancer metastasis. He is well known as a co-discoverer of fibronectin molecules, a discovery that has been listed by Thomson Scientific ScienceWatch as a Nobel Prize candidate.
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