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,
#8951
Alycia Stigall
#127788
Overall Influence
Alycia L. Stigall is an American palaeontologist. As a professor at Ohio University, she was the first to analyze the biogeographic ranges of Paleozoic fossils using Geographic information systems. Early life and education Stigall was born and raised in Colerain Township, Hamilton County, Ohio to parents Jackie and Joe Stigall. Growing up, she spent time collecting brachiopods and bryozoans from a nearby creek and went camping in various National Parks across the country. Stigall attended Colerain High School where she was a National Merit Finalist and member of the National Honor Society, Marching Band, Collage, Show Choir, and German Club.
Go to Profile#8952
Marc P. Sindou
#133404
Overall Influence
#8953
Sonja M. Best
#87789
Overall Influence
Sonja Marie Best is an Australian-American virologist. She is chief of the innate immunity and pathogenesis section at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Best researches interactions between pathogenic viruses and the host immune response using flavivirus as a model.
Go to Profile#8954
David Kleinfeld
#133413
Overall Influence
#8955
Fred Winston
#133419
Overall Influence
#8956
Bruce L. Levine
#133424
Overall Influence
#8957
Enrico Cabib
#133428
Overall Influence
#8958
Kurt Freund
#73724
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Kurt Freund was a Czech-Canadian physician and sexologist best known for developing the penile plethysmograph , research studies in pedophilia, and for the "courtship disorder" hypothesis as a taxonomy of certain paraphilias . After unsuccessful attempts to change men's sexual orientation, he advocated against conversion therapy and in favor of the decriminalization of homosexuality.
Go to Profile#8959
Widmar Tanner
#133430
Overall Influence
#8960
Hanneke Schuitemaker
#121083
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Hanneke Schuitemaker is a Dutch virologist, the Global Head of Viral Vaccine Discovery and Translational Medicine at Johnson & Johnson's Janssen Vaccines & Prevention, and a Professor of Virology at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers of the University of Amsterdam . She has been involved in the development of Janssen's Ebola vaccine and is involved in the development of a universal flu vaccine, HIV vaccine, RSV vaccine and COVID-19 vaccine.
Go to Profile#8961
Robert B. Dickson
#133450
Overall Influence
#8962
John L. Koprowski
#87773
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
John L. Koprowski, Dean and Professor, Haub School of Environment & Natural Resources, University of Wyoming, mammalogist, conservation biologist, and leading expert on the ecology and conservation of wildlife, especially squirrels, was born in 1961 in Lakewood, Ohio.
Go to Profile#8963
Tadashi Mori
#133464
Overall Influence
#8964
Birgitta Henriques-Normark
#122733
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Birgitta Henriques Normark is a Swedish doctor and researcher, focusing on the field of host-bacteria interactions and pneumococcal infections. She is a professor of Clinical Microbiology at the Karolinska Institute and is the head physician at the Karolinska University Hospital. She is a member of a number of academies including the European Academy of Microbiology, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, of which she was elected president in 2022.
Go to Profile#8965
Chester Mathis
#131651
Overall Influence
Chester Mathis is an American chemist who is currently the Distinguished Professor of Radiology at University of Pittsburgh and holds the UPMC Endowed Chair of PET Research. He is known for is work with William E. Klunk on a PET radiotracer for imaging amyloid, a protein linked to neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s. His efforts led to the creation of a novel category of high-efficacy radiopharmaceutical agents, for example Pittsburgh Compound-B , which can be used to assess beta-amyloid in the living human brain using PET scanning, and which is a fluorescent analog of thioflavin T.
Go to Profile#8966
Suse Broyde
#53827
Overall Influence
Suse Broyde is an American chemical biologist who is a Professor of Biology and Affiliate Professor of Chemistry at New York University. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms that process DNA damage induced by environmental and endogenous carcinogens, notably mutagenesis and repair.
Go to Profile#8967
Ray Franklin Evert
#133496
Overall Influence
#8968
Amy Jacot Guillarmod
#121823
Overall Influence
1911 - 1992 (81 years)
Amy Frances May Gordon Jacot Guillarmod , was a South African botanist and limnologist, noted for her work on the flora of Basutoland and some 200 publications, including numerous papers on wetlands, bogs and sponges.
Go to Profile#8969
John B. Schenkman
#133515
Overall Influence
#8970
Bjarne Bogen
#120609
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bjarne Bogen is a Norwegian immunologist, inventor and physician. He is widely known for his research on DNA vaccines, autoimmune disorders and cancer immunology. Career Bogen graduated with a medical degree from the University of Oslo in 1977. In the following two years, he completed his internship at Sandnessjøen hospital and in the municipalities of Lurøy and Træna at the coastline of northern Norway. In 1984, at the University of Tromsø he defended his PhD thesis entitled "Murine Th and B Lymphocyte Recognition of Isologous Immunoglobulin".
Go to Profile#8971
Björn Wiman
#133538
Overall Influence
#8972
Ayşegül A. Şahin
#133540
Overall Influence
#8973
Edward D. Houde
#133543
Overall Influence
#8974
Gregory Berns
#73365
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Gregory Scott Berns is an American neuroeconomist, neuroscientist, professor of psychiatry, psychologist and writer. He lives with his family in Atlanta, Georgia, US. Berns holds the Distinguished Chair of Neuroeconomics in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta where he is a professor of both psychiatry and economics. He is Director of the Center for Neuropolicy; the author of the books Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscie...
Go to Profile#8975
Samuel A. Latt
#133552
Overall Influence
#8976
Claude Klee
#114691
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Claude Klee was a French biochemist. Biography Claude B. Klee attended the University of Marseille until she graduated with her medical degree in 1959. She moved to the United States to work at the National Institute of Mental Health and also spent some time in Basel. In 1961 Klee began to work at the National Institutes of Health with Herbert Tabor, Louis Sokoloff and Maxine Singer. By 1966 Klee had a laboratory at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. In 1974 she started what was to become her iconic work at the National Cancer Institute's Biochemistry Laboratory which led to the 1991 Presidential Rank Awards.
Go to Profile#8977
Jeffrey S. Levinton
#133570
Overall Influence
#8978
Corey Nislow
#133571
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Corey Nislow is an American geneticist and molecular biologist. He is a Professor of genomics, pharmaceutical science and biochemistry at the University of British Columbia. Biography Corey Nislow received his Bachelor of Arts in developmental biology at New College . In 1994, He completed his PhD in cell and molecular biology at the University of Colorado under the supervision of Professor Richard McIntosh, and then pursued his postdoctoral studies at the American Cancer Society. Nislow spent 6 years working in several Bay Area biotechs and has co-led genomics laboratories at Stanford University , University of Toronto, and University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#8979
Robert E. Condon
#133573
Overall Influence
#8980
Willy Gepts
#124084
Overall Influence
1922 - 1991 (69 years)
Willy Gepts was a Belgian pathologist and diabetes researcher. He worked from 1965 as a professor of pathology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and later at the newly founded Dutch-speaking Vrije Universiteit Brussel. With his research on pathological anatomy of the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas, he made important contributions to force up today view that the referred to as type 1 diabetes, type of diabetes mellitus is an autoimmune disease.
Go to Profile#8981
Karissa Sanbonmatsu
#98970
Overall Influence
Karissa Y. Sanbonmatsu is an American structural biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She works on the mechanism of non-coding RNA complexes including the ribosome, riboswitches, long non-coding RNAs, as well as chromatin. She was the first to perform an atomistic simulation of the ribosome, determine the secondary structure of an intact lncRNA and to publish a one billion atom simulation of a biomolecular complex.
Go to Profile#8982
Catherine A. Lozupone
#85271
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Catherine Anne Lozupone is an American microbiologist who specializes in bacteria and how they impact human health. Her noted work in trying to determine what constitutes "normal" gut bacteria, led to her creation of the UniFrac algorithm, used by researchers to plot the relationships between microbial communities in the human body.
Go to Profile#8983
Russell Howard Swerdlow
#133614
Overall Influence
#8984
Kazi Zaker Husain
#109228
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Kazi Zaker Husain was a Bangladeshi zoologist. He was awarded Independence Day Award in 1992 by the Government of Bangladesh. Career Husain served as a faculty member of the Department of Zoology at the University of Dhaka since 1953. He went on to be the Dean of the Faculty of Biological Science.
Go to Profile#8985
Shaun Purcell
#112134
Overall Influence
Shaun M. Purcell is a British genetic epidemiologist and statistical geneticist. He is a senior associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and its Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He is also a faculty member at the Brigham and Women's Hospital Department of Psychiatry.
Go to Profile#8986
Loren Williams
#121700
Overall Influence
Loren Dean Williams is a biophysicist, biochemist, astrobiologist, and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. His research seeks to understand the structural basis for macromolecular reactions, from the role of nucleic acids as targets of chemotherapeutics to the ancestral biochemistry of the ribosome during the origin of life.
Go to Profile#8987
Avrelija Cencič
#121089
Overall Influence
1964 - 2012 (48 years)
Avrelija Cencič was a Slovenian university professor, researcher in the fields of biochemistry, molecular biology and immunology, manager and educator in health and life sciences. Education and training In 2000 she made her PhD from biochemistry and molecular biology of leukocytic and trophoblastic interferon gamma participating with University of Paris XI, Orsay, France and University of Ljubljana, Medical Faculty, Slovenia.
Go to Profile#8988
Jeremy J. Burdon
#133665
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#8989
John Marzluff
#111180
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
John Marzluff is a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and an author. In the Company of Crows and Ravens was written with and illustrated by Tony Angell. They discuss the ways that crows are like humans, and the many different ways that humans have treated crows. In Gifts of the Crow, Marzluff and Angell documented how intelligent crows are, with both anecdotes and research. In Subirdia, Marzluff shows how seven "exploiter" birds have enlarged their territories by taking advantage of human-made changes to the environment, and discusses how we could make our back yards better for birds.
Go to Profile#8990
Johannes Sjöstrand
#133681
Overall Influence
#8991
Naoyuki Kamatani
#133692
Overall Influence
#8992
Sanjay Kumar Nigam
#133696
Overall Influence
#8993
E. Rudolph Froesch
#133700
Overall Influence
#8994
Barry Trimmer
#69444
Overall Influence
Barry Andrew Trimmer is an American scientist, and the Henry Bromfield Pearson Professor of Natural Sciences at Tufts University. In addition to his primary appointment in the Department of Biology he holds secondary appointments in Biomedical Engineering and in Neuroscience at the Tufts Graduate School of Biomedical Science. His research primarily focuses on neurobiology, biomechanics / neuromechanics and soft-bodied locomotion.
Go to Profile#8995
Bennett Van Houten
#133713
Overall Influence
#8996
Rachel Green
#127925
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Rachel Green is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on ribosomes and their function in translation. Green has also been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000.
Go to Profile#8997
James Eric Dahlberg
#133733
Overall Influence
#8998
Tibor Borsós
#133735
Overall Influence
#8999
Jürgen W. Spranger
#133758
Overall Influence
#9000
Charles S. Yentsch
#133760
Overall Influence
