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).

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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#901

Geoffrey M. Cooper

#31093

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Geoffrey M. Cooper is professor of biology at Boston University. He served as chair of the department of biology for a number of years, and subsequently as associate dean of the faculty for the natural sciences in the university's college of arts & sciences.

#902

Federico Mayor Zaragoza

#3777

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Federico Mayor Zaragoza is a scientist, scholar, politician, diplomat, and poet from Spain. He served as the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization from 1987 to 1999. After his tenure as Director-General, he continued to participate in various peace-related organizations such as the Foundation for a Culture of Peace and the International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World, as a member of their honorary boards. Additionally, he serves as the honorary chairman of the Académie de la Pai...

#903

Denis Duboule

#29704

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Denis Duboule is a Swiss-French biologist. He earned his PhD in Biology in 1984 and is currently Professor of Developmental Genetics and Genomics at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and at the Department of Genetics and Evolution of the University of Geneva. Since 2001, he is the Director of the Swiss National Research Center "Frontiers in Genetics" and since 2017, he is also a professor at the Collège de France. He has notably worked on Hox genes, a group of genes involved in the formation of the body plan and of the limbs.

#904

Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen

Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen

#27316

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen was a Danish-born American physiologist, who became the first woman president of the American Physiological Society in 1975. Biography Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1918, the youngest of four children of two eminent physiologists, the Nobel Laureate August Krogh and Marie Krogh.

#905

Nancy Coover Andreasen

#18673

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Nancy Coover Andreasen is an American neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist. She currently holds the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa.

#906

Robert G. Roeder

#22889

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Robert G. Roeder is an American biochemist. He is known as a pioneer scientist in eukaryotic transcription. He discovered three distinct nuclear RNA polymerases in 1969 and characterized many proteins involved in the regulation of transcription, including basic transcription factors and the first mammalian gene-specific activator over five decades of research. He is the recipient of the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2000, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2003, and the Kyoto Prize in 2021. He currently serves as Arnold and Mabel Beckman Professor and Head of ...

#907

Anthony Epstein

#13969

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (103 years)

Sir Michael Anthony Epstein is a British pathologist and academic. He is one of the discoverers of the Epstein–Barr virus, along with Yvonne Barr and Bert Achong. Early and personal life Epstein was born on 18 May 1921, and educated at St Paul's School in London, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Middlesex Hospital Medical School.

#908

Richard H. Ebright

#26903

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Richard High Ebright is an American molecular biologist. He is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology.

#909

Jerard Hurwitz

#23342

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Jerard Hurwitz was an American biochemist who co-discovered RNA polymerase in 1960 along with Sam Weiss, Audrey Stevens, and James Bonner. He most recently worked at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York studying DNA replication in eukaryotes and its control.

#910

Joseph DeRisi

#16724

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Joseph Lyman DeRisi is an American biochemist, specializing in molecular biology, parasitology, genomics, virology, and computational biology. Early life and education DeRisi was raised in Carmichael, California, where he graduated from Del Campo High School. He received a B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1992 from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

#911

L. Leonard Packer

#34784

Overall Influence

#912

Polly Matzinger

#17620

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Polly Celine Eveline Matzinger is a French-born immunologist who proposed the danger model theory of how the immune system works. Early years Polly Matzinger was born on July 21, 1947, in France, to a French mother and a Dutch father . In 1954, she immigrated to the US with her sister, Marjolaine, and parents. Her prior jobs included being a bass jazz musician, carpenter, dog trainer, waitress, and Playboy Bunny. Although it took her eleven years to finish her undergraduate degree, she finished her BS in biology at the University of California, Irvine, in 1976. She was talked into going to g...

#913

Peter Goldblatt

#32130

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Peter Goldblatt is a South African botanist, working principally in the United States. Life Goldblatt was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on October 8, 1943. His undergraduate studies were undertaken at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesberg , from where he went on to graduate studies at the University of Cape Town, where he received his doctorate in 1970. He held a position as lecturer in botany at Witwatersrand and then Cape Town before emigrating to the United States in 1972. In the US he took up a position as a researcher at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, in St. Louis, where he has remained since, holding the position of Senior Curator since 1990.

#914

Jessica Meir

#10646

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Jessica Ulrika Meir is an American NASA astronaut, marine biologist, and physiologist. She was previously an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, following postdoctoral research in comparative physiology at the University of British Columbia. She has studied the diving physiology and behavior of emperor penguins in Antarctica, and the physiology of bar-headed geese, which are able to migrate over the Himalayas. In September 2002, Meir served as an aquanaut on the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 4 crew. In 2013, she was selected by NASA to Astronaut Group 21.

#915

Daniel Edward Koshland

#34837

Overall Influence

#916

Ira Herskowitz

#21729

Overall Influence

1946 - 2003 (57 years)

Ira Herskowitz was an American phage and yeast geneticist who studied genetic regulatory circuits and mechanisms. He was particularly noted for his work on mating type switching and cellular differentiation, largely using Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism.

#917

John Hardy

#28580

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Sir John Anthony Hardy is a human geneticist and molecular biologist at the Reta Lila Weston Institute of Neurological Studies at University College London with research interests in neurological diseases.

#918

Don W. Cleveland

Don W. Cleveland

#30913

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Don W. Cleveland is an American cancer biologist and neurobiologist. Cleveland is currently the Department Chair of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Neurosciences at the University of California at San Diego, and Head, Laboratory for Cell Biology at the San Diego branch of Ludwig Cancer Research.

#919

Bernard Moss

#31102

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Bernard Moss is a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the United States National Institutes of Health. He is the Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Viral Diseases and of the NIAID Genetic Engineering Section. He is known for his work on poxviruses.

#920

Ian Brooker

#25036

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Murray Ian Hill Brooker AM , better known as Ian Brooker, was an Australian botanist. He was widely recognised as the leading authority on the genus Eucalyptus. Ian Brooker was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 2 June 1934. He obtained a B.Ag.Sc. from the University of Adelaide, and a MSc and D.Sc. from the Australian National University in Canberra. He worked with the Soil Conservation Branch of the Department of Agriculture in South Australia from 1957 to 1963; then joined the Department of Botany at the Australian National University until 1969; and then spent a year with the Western Aus...

#921

John Endler

#23185

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

John Arthur Endler is a Canadian ethologist and evolutionary biologist noted for his work on the adaptation of vertebrates to their unique perceptual environments, and the ways in which animal sensory capacities and colour patterns co-evolve.

#922

Peter Richerson

#12675

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Peter James Richerson is an American biologist. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. Life Richerson studied entomology at UC Davis, earning his B.S. in 1965. In 1969, he completed his Ph.D. in zoology. After a postdoc and junior professorship, he was from 1977 until 2006 Professor of Environmental Science at UC Davis. He was a guest professor at University of California, Berkeley , Duke University , and the University of Exeter . In 1991 he was a guest researcher at the Bielefeld University. He has...

#923

Keith Yamamoto

#21266

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Keith R. Yamamoto is vice chancellor of Science Policy and Strategy and professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, . He is known for his Molecular Biology and Biochemistry research on nuclear receptors and his involvement in science policy and precision medicine.

#924

Douglas C. Wallace

Douglas C. Wallace

#16812

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Douglas Cecil Wallace is a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. He pioneered the use of human mitochondrial DNA as a molecular marker.

#925

Christopher T. Walsh

#18831

Overall Influence

1944 - 2023 (79 years)

Christopher T. Walsh was a Hamilton Kuhn professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His research focused on enzymes and enzyme inhibition, and most recently focused on the problem of antibiotic resistance. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989.

#926

Ronald Vale

#23288

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Ronald David Vale ForMemRS is an American biochemist and cell biologist. He is a professor at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco. His research is focused on motor proteins, particularly kinesin and dynein. He was awarded the Canada Gairdner International Award for Biomedical Research in 2019, the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine in 2017 together with Ian Gibbons, and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2012 alongside Michael Sheetz and James Spudich. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

#927

Elaine Jaffe

#19032

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Elaine Sarkin Jaffe is a senior National Cancer Institute investigator at the National Institutes of Health most well known for her contribution to hematopathology. She completed her medical education at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania, receiving her M.D. degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1969. After an internship at Georgetown University she joined NCI as a resident in anatomic pathology, and has been a senior investigator since 1974, focusing on the classification and definition of lymphomas. Jaffe's early work helped to provide a deeper understanding of the origin of lymphomas, especially follicular lymphoma.

#928

Arno Motulsky

#18012

Overall Influence

1923 - 2018 (95 years)

Arno Gunther Motulsky was a professor of medical genetics and genome sciences at the University of Washington. Motulsky is considered a founder of the field of medical genetics. He is also considered the "father of pharmacogenetics", and is credited with coining the term.[2]

#929

György Buzsáki

#20324

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

György Buzsáki is the Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University School of Medicine. Education Buzsáki completed his M.D. in 1974 at the University of Pécs in Hungary, and obtained his PhD in neuroscience under the supervision of Endre Grastyán.

#930

Max Poll

#25560

Overall Influence

1908 - 1991 (83 years)

Max Fernand Leon Poll was a Belgian ichthyologist who specialised in the Cichlidae. In the years 1946 and 1947 he organised an expedition to Lake Tanganyika. He has described several species of Pseudocrenilabrinae, such as Lamprologus signatus, Steatocranus casuarius, Neolamprologus brichardi, and Neolamprologus pulcher.

#931

Hans-Dieter Sues

#19612

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Hans-Dieter Sues is a German-born American paleontologist who is Senior Scientist and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

#932

William S. Sly

#18532

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

William S. Sly is an internationally known physician and scientist who, except for sabbatical years at Oxford and Stanford, spent his entire academic career in St. Louis. Following M.D. training at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, he trained in internal medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and in research laboratories at the NIH, in Paris, and in Madison, Wisconsin. He then joined the faculty at Washington University, where he directed the division of medical genetics for 20 years. In 1984, he was recruited to St. Louis University School of Medicine and appointed Alice A. Doisy Professor and chairman of the Edward A.

#933

Renata Laxova

#13302

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Renata Laxova was a Czech American pediatric geneticist and a professor of genetics at the Departments of Pediatrics and Medical Genetics, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was the discoverer of the Neu-Laxová syndrome, a rare congenital abnormality involving multiple organs, with autosomal recessive inheritance.

#934

Alain Fischer

#19245

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Alain Fischer is a doctor, professor of pediatric immunology and French researcher in biology. Biography Alain Fischer's father had wanted to become a doctor, but had been prevented from doing so by the numerous clauses established against the Jews of Hungary. Alain Fischer says his father was one of the reasons he has made a medical career choice.

#935

T. Ryan Gregory

#24698

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

T. Ryan Gregory is a Canadian evolutionary biologist and genome biologist and a Professor of the Department of Integrative Biology and the Division of Genomic Diversity within the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

#936

Hendrik Streeck

Hendrik Streeck

#17856

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Hendrik Streeck is a German researcher of human immunodeficiency virus, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. He is professor of virology and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at the University Bonn.

#937

Anthony Cerami

#16298

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Anthony Cerami is an American entrepreneur and medical research scientist. Biography Anthony Cerami received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. in 1967 from Rockefeller University, New York, completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School and at the Jackson Laboratory and served for 20 years as Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Medical Biochemistry, and Dean of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies at Rockefeller.

#938

Jonathan Ott

#5955

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jonathan Ott is an ethnobotanist, writer, translator, publisher, natural products chemist and botanical researcher in the area of entheogens and their cultural and historical uses, and helped coin the term "entheogen".

#939

Matthew Cobb

#15598

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Matthew Cobb is a British zoologist and professor of zoology at the University of Manchester. He is known for his popular science books The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth; Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code; and The Idea of the Brain: A History. Cobb has appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, The Life Scientific, and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, as well as on BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service.

#940

Caleb Finch

#15055

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Caleb Ellicott Finch is an American academic who is a professor at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Finch's research focuses on aging in humans, with a specialization in cell biology and Alzheimer's disease.

#941

John Beddington

John Beddington

#10158

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Sir John Rex Beddington HonFREng is a British population biologist and Senior Adviser at the Oxford Martin School, and was previously Professor of Applied Population Biology at Imperial College London, and the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2008 until 2013.

#942

Erich Jarvis

#18051

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Erich Jarvis is an American professor at Rockefeller University. He is the head of a team of researchers who study the neurobiology of vocal learning, a critical behavioral substrate for spoken language. Jarvis uses animal studies including songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds. His research reasons that bird groups have similar learning abilities to humans in the context of sound. For example, learning new sounds and then passing on vocal repertoires from one generation to the next. Jarvis focuses on the molecular pathways involved in the perception and production of learned vocalizations, and...

#943

Leo Sachs

#15256

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Leo Sachs was a German-born Israeli molecular biologist and cancer researcher. Born in Leipzig, he emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1933, and to Israel in 1952. There he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science.

#944

Dietmar Vestweber

#21164

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Dietmar Vestweber is a biochemist and cell biologist. He is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany. Biography Dietmar Vestweber studied biochemistry at the Universities of Tübingen and Munich and at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried. He received his PhD from the University of Tübingen in 1985 for his research conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology.

#945

Ricardo Miledi

#11524

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Ricardo Miledi was a Mexican neuroscientist known for his work deciphering the role of calcium in neurotransmitter release. He also helped to develop a technique for studying native receptors in frog oocytes for drug development.

#946

Lawrence Alexander Sidney Johnson

#26279

Overall Influence

1925 - 1997 (72 years)

Lawrence Alexander Sidney Johnson FAA, known as Lawrie Johnson, was an Australian taxonomic botanist. He worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, for the whole of his professional career, as a botanist , Director and Honorary Research Associate .

#947

Marion M. Bradford

#26809

Overall Influence

1946 - 2021 (75 years)

Marion Mckinley Bradford was an American scientist who developed and patented the Bradford protein assay, a method to quickly quantify the amount of protein in a sample. His paper describing the method is among the most cited scholarly articles of all time.

#948

Stephen Faraone

#16855

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Stephen Vincent Faraone is an American psychologist. He has worked mainly on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and related disorders. Education and career Faraone graduated in 1978 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a BA in Psychology. He then went to the University of Iowa where he obtained his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy. Faraone completed a postdoctoral clinical psychology internship and a research fellowship at Brown University.

#949

Jillian Banfield

Jillian Banfield

#17499

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jillian Fiona Banfield is professor at the University of California, Berkeley with appointments in the Earth Science, Ecosystem Science and Materials Science and Engineering departments. She leads the Microbial Research initiative within the Innovative Genomics Institute, is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has a position at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Some of her most noted work includes publications on the structure and functioning of microbial communities and the nature, properties and reactivity of nanomaterials.

#950

Armand Marie Leroi

#31152

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Armand Marie Leroi is a New Zealand-born Dutch author, broadcaster, and professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London. He received the Guardian First Book Award in 2004 for his book Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. He has presented scientific documentaries on Channel 4 such as Alien Worlds and What Makes Us Human , and BBC Four such as What Darwin Didn't Know , Aristotle's Lagoon , and Secret Science of Pop .

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