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,
#101
Bruce Alberts
#2998
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Bruce Michael Alberts is an American biochemist and the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education, emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He has done important work studying the protein complexes which enable chromosome replication when living cells divide. He is known as an original author of the "canonical, influential, and best-selling scientific textbook" Molecular Biology of the Cell, and as Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine.
Go to Profile#102
George Davis Snell
#2219
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
George Davis Snell NAS was an American mouse geneticist and basic transplant immunologist. Work George Snell shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Baruj Benacerraf and Jean Dausset for their discoveries concerning "genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions". Snell specifically "discovered the genetic factors that determine the possibilities of transplanting tissue from one individual to another. It was Snell who introduced the concept of H antigens." Snell's work in mice led to the discovery of HLA, the major histocompatibility complex, in humans that is analogous to the H-2 complex in mice.
Go to Profile#103
M. S. Swaminathan
#1270
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was an Indian agronomist, agricultural scientist, plant geneticist, administrator, and humanitarian. Swaminathan was a global leader of the green revolution. He has been called the main architect of the green revolution in India for his leadership and role in introducing and further developing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice. Swaminathan's collaborative scientific efforts with Norman Borlaug, spearheading a mass movement with farmers and other scientists and backed by public policies, saved India and Pakistan from certain famine-like conditions in the 1960s.
Go to Profile#104
Kenneth R. Miller
#2222
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth Raymond Miller is an American cell biologist, molecular biologist, and Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brown University. Miller's primary research focus is the structure and function of cell membranes, especially chloroplast thylakoid membranes. Miller is a co-author of a major introductory college and high school biology textbook published by Prentice Hall since 1990.
Go to Profile#105
Niels Kaj Jerne
#2432
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Niels Kaj Jerne, FRS was a Danish immunologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Georges J. F. Köhler and César Milstein "for theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies".
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Bruce Ames
#2499
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Bruce Nathan Ames is an American biochemist. He is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute . He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds.
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Paul Greengard
#1560
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Paul Greengard was an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons. In 2000, Greengard, Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. He was Vincent Astor Professor at Rockefeller University, and served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Cure Alzheimer's Fund, as well as the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. He was married to artist Ursula von Rydingsvard.
Go to Profile#108
Linda B. Buck
#2193
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Brown Buck is an American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system. She was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Richard Axel, for their work on olfactory receptors. She is currently on the faculty of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Go to Profile#109
Jerry Coyne
#1386
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Ecology, Evolution Jerry Coyne is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago for the Department of Ecology and Evolution. He earned a BS in biology from the William & Mary. He was drafted while attending graduate school at Rockefeller University, but returned to his studies upon his return, earning a PhD in biology from Harvard University. He went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Davis. He is an expert in speciation and ecological and evolutionary genetics. He has been a vocal critic of religion, intelligent design, theistic evolution, and creationism, and has authored several books on the topic, including Faith vs.
Go to Profile#110
Satoshi Ōmura
#1247
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
is a Japanese biochemist. He is known for the discovery and development of hundreds of pharmaceuticals originally occurring in microorganisms. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell for their role in the discovery of avermectins and ivermectin, the world's first endectocide and a safe and highly effective microfilaricide. It is believed that the large molecular size of ivermectin prevents it from crossing the blood/aqueous humour barrier, and renders the drug an important treatment of helminthically-derived blindness.
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Simon Conway Morris
#1829
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Simon Conway Morris is an English palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist known for his study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion. The results of these discoveries were celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book Wonderful Life. Conway Morris's own book on the subject, The Crucible of Creation , however, is critical of Gould's presentation and interpretation.
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James F. Crow
#4120
Overall Influence
1916 - 2012 (96 years)
James Franklin Crow was Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a prominent population geneticist whose career spanned from the modern synthesis to the genomic era.
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Matthew Meselson
#2347
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Matthew Stanley Meselson is a geneticist and molecular biologist currently at Harvard University, known for his demonstration, with Franklin Stahl, of semi-conservative DNA replication. After completing his Ph.D. under Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology, Meselson became a Professor at Harvard University in 1960, where he has remained, today, as Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#114
Robert Tjian
#3998
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Robert Tjian is a Hong Kong-born American biochemist best known for his work on eukaryotic transcription. He is currently professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . On April 1, 2009, Tjian became the President of HHMI. On August 4, 2015, he announced that he would step down as President at the end of 2016.
Go to Profile#115
Martin Chalfie
#1884
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Martin Lee Chalfie is an American scientist. He is University Professor at Columbia University. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP". He holds a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard University.
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Margarita Salas
#3019
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Margarita Salas Falgueras, 1st Marchioness of Canero was a Spanish scientist, medical researcher, and author in the fields of biochemistry and molecular genetics. She started developing molecular biology in Spain and also worked as an honorary associate professor of CSIC, at the Severo Ochoa Biology Center . In 2016 she became the first women ever to receive the Echegaray Medal, that was given to her by the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences .
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Robert Weinberg
#2383
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Allan Weinberg is a biologist, Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , director of the Ludwig Center of the MIT, and American Cancer Society Research Professor. His research is in the area of oncogenes and the genetic basis of human cancer.
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Howard T. Odum
#1117
Overall Influence
1924 - 2002 (78 years)
Howard Thomas Odum , usually cited as H. T. Odum, was an American ecologist. He is known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology, and for his provocative proposals for additional laws of thermodynamics, informed by his work on general systems theory.
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Sidney Altman
#1424
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Sidney Altman was a Canadian-American molecular biologist, who was the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University. In 1989, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas R. Cech for their work on the catalytic properties of RNA.
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Barry Commoner
#1065
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
Barry Commoner was an American cellular biologist, college professor, and politician. He was a leading ecologist and among the founders of the modern environmental movement. He was the director of the Center for Biology of Natural Systems and its Critical Genetics Project. He ran as the Citizens Party candidate in the 1980 U.S. presidential election. His work studying the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
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Andrew Benson
#2160
Overall Influence
1917 - 2015 (98 years)
Andrew Alm Benson was an American biologist and a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, until his retirement in 1989. He is known for his work in understanding the carbon cycle in plants.
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Eric Lander
#937
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Areas of Specialization: Systems Biology, Genetics Eric Lander is founding director of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Princeton University as valedictorian, with a BS in mathematics. He went on to attend University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned his PhD He is a founder of Verastem and a founding advisor of Foundation Medicine. He began his career in mathematics, but soon started looking at mathematical applications in neurobiology.
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Martin Rodbell
#2519
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Martin Rodbell was an American biochemist and molecular endocrinologist who is best known for his discovery of G-proteins. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alfred G. Gilman for "their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells."
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Bert Hölldobler
#2555
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Berthold Karl Hölldobler BVO is a German zoologist, sociobiologist and evolutionary biologist who studies evolution and social organization in ants. He is the author of several books, including The Ants, for which he and his co-author, E. O. Wilson, received the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction writing in 1991.
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Robert T. Bakker
#3207
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Thomas Bakker is an American paleontologist who helped reshape modern theories about dinosaurs, particularly by adding support to the theory that some dinosaurs were endothermic . Along with his mentor John Ostrom, Bakker was responsible for initiating the ongoing "dinosaur renaissance" in paleontological studies, beginning with Bakker's article "Dinosaur Renaissance" in the April 1975 issue of Scientific American. His specialty is the ecological context and behavior of dinosaurs.
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John Sulston
#2012
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Sir John Edward Sulston was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He was a leader in human genome research and Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston was in favour of science in the public interest, such as free public access of scientific information and against the patenting of genes and the privatisation...
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Paul D. MacLean
#1860
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Paul Donald MacLean was an American physician and neuroscientist who made significant contributions in the fields of physiology, psychiatry, and brain research through his work at Yale Medical School and the National Institute of Mental Health. MacLean's evolutionary triune brain theory proposed that the human brain was in reality three brains in one: the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex.
Go to Profile#128
Stanley B. Prusiner
#1911
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Stanley Ben Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco . Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for prion research developed by him and his team of experts beginning in the early 1970s.
Go to Profile#129
Robert Sapolsky
#1381
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Robert Morris Sapolsky is an American neuroendocrinology researcher and author. He is a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya.
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Ulrich K. Laemmli
#7079
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Ulrich K. Laemmli, real name Lämmli, is a Professor in the biochemistry and molecular biology departments at University of Geneva. He is known for the refinement of SDS-PAGE, a widely used method for separating proteins based on their electrophoretic mobility. His paper describing the method is among the most cited scholarly journal articles of all time. His current research involves studying the structural organization of nuclei and chromatin within the cell.
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Charles Weissmann
#3834
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Charles Weissmann is a Hungarian-Swiss molecular biologist. Weissmann is particularly known for the first cloning and expression of interferon and his contributions to the unraveling of the molecular genetics of neurogenerative prion diseases such as scrapie, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and "mad cow disease".
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Paul Sereno
#2755
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paul Callistus Sereno is a professor of paleontology at the University of Chicago and a National Geographic "explorer-in-residence" who has discovered several new dinosaur species on several continents, including at sites in Inner Mongolia, Argentina, Morocco and Niger. One of his most widely publicized discoveries is that of a nearly complete specimen of Sarcosuchus imperator — popularly known as SuperCroc — at Gadoufaoua in the Tenere desert of Niger.
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Elaine Ingham
#6781
Overall Influence
Elaine Ingham is an American microbiologist and soil biology researcher and founder of Soil Foodweb Inc. She is known as a leader in soil microbiology and research of the soil food web, She is an author of the USDA's Soil Biology Primer.
Go to Profile#134
Michael Gazzaniga
#1072
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#135
Elvin A. Kabat
#3906
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Elvin Abraham Kabat was an American biomedical scientist and one of the founding fathers of quantitative immunochemistry. Kabat was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1977, National Medal of Science in 1991, and American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. He is the father of Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Go to Profile#136
Feng Zhang
#3254
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Areas of Specialization: Neuroscience, Bioengineering Feng Zhang is a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor in Neuroscience for the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and for Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After immigrating to the US from China with his mother at the age of 11, he attended school in Iowa. He earned his BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard University and his PhD in chemical and biological engineering from Stanford University. Best kn...
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Alec Jeffreys
#880
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sir Alec John Jeffreys, is a British geneticist known for developing techniques for genetic fingerprinting and DNA profiling which are now used worldwide in forensic science to assist police detective work and to resolve paternity and immigration disputes. He is Professor of Genetics at the University of Leicester, and became an honorary freeman of the City of Leicester on 26 November 1992. In 1994, he was knighted for services to genetics.
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Leigh Van Valen
#2553
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Leigh Van Valen was a U.S. evolutionary biologist. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. Research and interests Amongst other work, Van Valen's proposed "Law of Extinction", known as Van Valen's law, drew upon the apparent constant probability of extinction in families of related organisms, based on data compiled from existing literature on the duration of tens of thousands of genera throughout the fossil record. Van Valen proposed the Red Queen Hypothesis , as an explanatory tangent to the Law of Extinction.
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Edmond H. Fischer
#1413
Overall Influence
1920 - 2021 (101 years)
Edmond Henri Fischer was a Swiss-American biochemist. He and his collaborator Edwin G. Krebs were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1992 for describing how reversible phosphorylation works as a switch to activate proteins and regulate various cellular processes. From 2007 until 2014, he was the Honorary President of the World Cultural Council. At the time of his death at age 101 in 2021, he was the oldest living Nobel Prize laureate.
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Konrad Emil Bloch
#2876
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Konrad Emil Bloch was a German-American biochemist. Bloch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1964 for discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.
Go to Profile#141
Julius Axelrod
#1803
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Julius Axelrod was an American biochemist. He won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970 along with Bernard Katz and Ulf von Euler. The Nobel Committee honored him for his work on the release and reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters, a class of chemicals in the brain that include epinephrine, norepinephrine, and, as was later discovered, dopamine. Axelrod also made major contributions to the understanding of the pineal gland and how it is regulated during the sleep-wake cycle.
Go to Profile#142
Masatoshi Nei
#4723
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Masatoshi Nei is a Carnell Professor with the department of biology at Temple University. An evolutionary biologist, he studied at both Kyoto University and the University of Miyazaki. He has been prolific in the development of the statistical theory of molecular evolution, developing new theories as new discoveries in molecular biology emerge. He has worked at institutions such as Brown University, National Institute of Radiological Sciences and Kyoto University, advancing his understanding of how mutations can drive evolution. He is famous for ma...
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Daniel I. Arnon
#5172
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Daniel Israel Arnon was a Polish-born American plant physiologist and National Medal of Science recipient whose research led to greater insights into the operation of photosynthesis and nutrition in plants.
Go to Profile#144
Robert W. Holley
#2375
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Robert William Holley was an American biochemist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 for describing the structure of alanine transfer RNA, linking DNA and protein synthesis.
Go to Profile#145
Solomon H. Snyder
#3287
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Solomon Halbert Snyder is an American neuroscientist who has made wide-ranging contributions to neuropharmacology and neurochemistry. He studied at Georgetown University, and has conducted the majority of his research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Snyder's identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs, and elucidation of the actions of psychotropic agents. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1978 for his research on the opioid receptor, and is one of the most highly cited researche...
Go to Profile#146
Herman Kalckar
#5641
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Herman Moritz Kalckar was a Danish biochemist who pioneered the study of cellular respiration. Kalckar made a number of significant contributions to the development of 20th century biochemistry including:a founder of bioenergetics;enzymology, including novel assay techniques;galactose metabolism in both microorganisms and animal tissues;suggestion that strontium-90 levels in children’s deciduous teeth correlated with nuclear testing.
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Eugene Odum
#3090
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Eugene Pleasants Odum was an American biologist at the University of Georgia known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. He and his brother Howard T. Odum wrote the popular ecology textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology . The Odum School of Ecology is named in his honor.
Go to Profile#148
Paul D. Boyer
#2238
Overall Influence
1918 - 2018 (100 years)
Paul Delos Boyer was an American biochemist, analytical chemist, and a professor of chemistry at University of California Los Angeles . He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on the "enzymatic mechanism underlying the biosynthesis of adenosine triphosphate " with John E. Walker, making Boyer the first Utah-born Nobel laureate; the remainder of the Prize in that year was awarded to Danish chemist Jens Christian Skou for his discovery of the Na+/K+-ATPase.
Go to Profile#149
Edwin G. Krebs
#2393
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Edwin Gerhard Krebs was an American biochemist. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University in 1989 together with Alfred Gilman and, together with his collaborator Edmond H. Fischer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1992 for describing how reversible phosphorylation works as a switch to activate proteins and regulate various cellular processes.
Go to Profile#150
Marcus Feldman
#5272
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Marcus Feldman is co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics and the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, and director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies at Stanford University. He earned degrees in mathematics and statistics from the University of Western Australia, a master of science in mathematics from Monash University, and a PhD from Stanford University. While collaborating with L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, he introduced a quantitative theory of cultural ...
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