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

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1001

Jane Lubchenco

#13143

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

#1002

Octávio Mateus

#19742

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Octávio Mateus is a Portuguese dinosaur paleontologist and biologist Professor of Paleontology at the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He graduated in Universidade de Évora and received his PhD at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2005. He collaborates with Museu da Lourinhã, known for their dinosaur collection.

#1003

Miodrag Stojković

Miodrag Stojković

#32253

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Miodrag Stojković is a Serbian researcher in genetics with the Institute of Human Genetics at Newcastle University. He holds a PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. As of January 2006, he is serving as a deputy director and head of Cellular Reprogramming Laboratory, Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe, Valencia, Spain.

#1004

Jasper Rine

#30984

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jasper Donald Rine is an American scientist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Rine received his B.S. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1975 and his Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the University of Oregon in 1979. He then joined the Berkeley faculty in 1982. He is also a former director of the Human Genome Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, an honorific leadership group of the American Society for Microbiology.

#1005

Venki Ramakrishnan

Venki Ramakrishnan

#11343

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is president of the Royal Society, and a group leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology for the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Baroda and a Ph.D. in physics from Ohio University. He then studied biology at the University of California at San Diego, part of his journey from physics to biology. He went on to research as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, where he began his study of ribosomes. His work on ribosomes has provided structural insights into the atomic structure of the ribosome, using cryogenic electron microscopy to discover new structures.

#1006

James Kirchner

#14929

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

James W. Kirchner is professor of Earth and Planetary Science at University of California, Berkeley. His current research spans the fields of geomorphology, hydrology, environmental geochemistry, evolutionary ecology, and paleobiology. He currently serves as the director of Berkeley's Central Sierra Field Research Stations.

#1007

Arnold G. Kluge

#23725

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Arnold G. Kluge is professor emeritus of zoology and curator emeritus of amphibians and reptiles at the University of Michigan, Museum of Zoology. Kluge authored over 140 journal articles. He served as past president of the Willi Hennig Society and as editor-in-chief of its journal Cladistics. He served at the University of Michigan from 1965 until his retirement in 2003.

#1008

Naomi Pierce

#25693

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Naomi E. Pierce is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist who studies plant-herbivore coevolution and is a world authority on butterflies. She is the Hessel Professor of Biology and Curator of Lepidoptera in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

#1009

Hans Neurath

#21686

Overall Influence

1909 - 2002 (93 years)

Hans Neurath was a biochemist, a leader in protein chemistry, and the founding chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was born in Vienna, Austria, and received his doctorate in 1933 from the University of Vienna. He then studied in London and at the University of Minnesota. In 1938, he was appointed professor at Duke University, where he established a research program on the physical chemistry of proteins.

#1010

Bryan Clarke

#26415

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Bryan Campbell Clarke was a British Professor of genetics, latterly emeritus at the University of Nottingham. Clarke is particularly noted for his work on apostatic selection and other forms of frequency-dependent selection, and work on polymorphism in snails, much of it done during the 1960s. Later, he studied molecular evolution. He made the case for natural selection as an important factor in the maintenance of molecular variation, and in driving evolutionary changes in molecules through time. In doing so, he questioned the over-riding importance of random genetic drift advocated by King, Jukes, and Kimura.

#1011

Xiaodong Wang

#18659

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Xiaodong Wang is a Chinese-American biochemist best known for his work with apoptosis, one of the ways through which cells kill themselves. Early life and education Wang was born in Wuhan, China in 1963, and was raised in Xinxiang, Henan by his grandparents. His family was relatively well-educated. His grandfather was a high school English teacher, his grandmother a primary school teacher, and his great uncle a biology professor. His primary and secondary coincided with the Cultural Revolution, and he only started high school in 1978 at a top high school in Henan.

#1012

Henri Cappetta

#25320

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Henri Cappetta is a French ichthyologist specializing in the paleontology of sharks and rayss. External links Henri Cappetta on www.isem.cnrs.fr New sharks and rays from the Cenomanian and Turonian of Charentes, France. Romain Vullo, Henri Cappetta and Didier Néraudeau, Acta Palaeontol. Pol. 52 , pp. 99–116, 2007

#1013

Michael Berridge

#19018

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

Sir Michael John Berridge was a British physiologist and biochemist. Born and raised in Southern Rhodesia , he was best known for his work on cellular transmembrane signalling, in particular the discovery that inositol trisphosphate acts as a second messenger, linking events at the plasma membrane with the release of Ca2+ within the cell. , he was the Emeritus Babraham Fellow in the Signalling Programme Department of the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, and honorary professor of cell signalling at the University of Cambridge.

#1014

Edward Boyden

#11072

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Edward S. Boyden is an American neuroscientist at MIT. He is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, a faculty member in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. In 2018 he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is recognized for his work on optogenetics. In this technology, a light-sensitive ion channel such as channelrhodopsin-2 is genetically expressed in neurons, allowing neuronal activity to be controlled by light. There were early efforts to achieve targeted optical control dating back to 2002 that did not involve ...

#1015

Tyler Jacks

#27669

Overall Influence

Tyler Jacks is a David H. Koch Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , a long-time HHMI investigator, and Founding Director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, which brings together biologists and engineers to improve detection, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. Dr. Jacks is a member of the board of directors of Thermo Fisher Scientific and Amgen, two of the major biotechnology corporations in the world. He is the President of Break Through Cancer, a foundation dedicated to supporting multi-institutional teams of researchers focused on finding solutions to some of the most difficult to treat cancers.

#1016

Steven M. Stanley

#19791

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Steven M. Stanley is an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is best known for his empirical research documenting the evolutionary process of punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record.

#1017

Anil Seth

#7730

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Anil Kumar Seth is a British professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. Early life and education Seth was born in England. His father, Bhola Seth, obtained a BSc from Allahabad University in 1945, before migrating from India to the United Kingdom to study engineering at Cardiff. Bhola Seth subsequently obtained a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Sheffield. His mother, Ann Delaney, came from Yorkshire. Seth's family was based in rural Oxfordshire. His father was a research scientist at the Esso Research Centre in Abingdon, and won the veterans' world doub...

#1018

Edward D. Goldberg

#23101

Overall Influence

1921 - 2008 (87 years)

Edward David Goldberg was a marine chemist, known for his studies of pollution in the oceans. Biography Goldberg was born on August 2, 1921, in Sacramento, California. He received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1942, and then, after serving in the Navy during World War II, did his graduate studies under the supervision of Harrison Brown at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1949. For the rest of his life, he worked as a professor of chemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

#1019

Malcolm McKenna

Malcolm McKenna

#21710

Overall Influence

1930 - 2008 (78 years)

Malcolm Carnegie McKenna was an American paleontologist and author on the subject. Paleontologist McKenna began his paleontology career at the Webb School of California in Claremont, California, under noted paleontologist and teacher, Raymond Alf. He attended the California Institute of Technology and Pomona College, then graduated in paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned his Ph.D.

#1020

Rolf Apweiler

#27415

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Rolf Apweiler is a director of European Bioinformatics Institute part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory with Ewan Birney. Education Apweiler gained his PhD in biochemistry from Heidelberg University.

#1021

Daniel J. Klionsky

#34208

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Daniel Jay Klionsky is an American biochemist and molecular biologist. He is the Alexander G. Ruthven Professor of Life Sciences and professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of Michigan. As a cell biologist, Klionsky pioneered the understanding of autophagy, the process by which cells break down to survive stress conditions such as starvation, and the role autophagy plays in cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and other areas of human health.

#1022

Jakob Segal

#12304

Overall Influence

1911 - 1995 (84 years)

Jakob Segal was a Russian-born German biology professor at Humboldt University of Berlin in the former East Germany. He was one of the advocates of the conspiracy theory that HIV was created by the United States government at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

#1023

Harold Cogger

#13660

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Harold George "Hal" Cogger is an Australian herpetologist. He was curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Australian Museum from 1960 to 1975, and Deputy Director of the museum from 1976 to 1995. He has written extensively on Australian herpetology, and was the first author to create a field guide for all Australian frogs and reptiles.

#1024

Jim Kent

#12291

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

William James Kent is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects and the 2003 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award. Early life Kent was born in Hawaii and grew up in San Francisco, California, United States.

#1025

Szczepan Pieniążek

Szczepan Pieniążek

#29659

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

Szczepan Aleksander Pieniążek was a Polish pomologist, professor of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, and a vice-president of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was a pioneer in Polish horticulture, which was in need of reform after World War II. Having studied in the United States, Pieniążek brought to Poland innovative solutions to various fruit-growing problems. In his scientific research, he generally focused on pomology, plant physiology, and conservation of orchards. He published over one hundred publications, including an academic handbook "Horticulture".

#1026

Tony Kouzarides

#28523

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Tony Kouzarides , FMedSci, FRS is a senior group leader Gurdon Institute, a founding non-executive director of Abcam and a Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Cambridge. Education Tony did his PhD at the University of Cambridge and postdoctoral work at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and New York University Medical Center. His research group at the Gurdon Institute is focused on epigenetic modifications and their involvement in cancer.

#1027

Fernando Nottebohm

#28636

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Fernando Nottebohm is a neuroscientist and the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Professor at Rockefeller University, as well as being head of the Laboratory of Animal Behavior and director of the Field Research Center for Ecology and Ethology.

#1028

Axel Meyer

#27532

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Axel Meyer is a German evolutionary biologist and a professor of zoology and evolutionary biology at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Meyer is best known for his work on the evolution and adaptive radiation of African cichlid fishes, fish-specific genome duplications, molecular phylogenetics of vertebrates, and the role of ecological and sexual selection in speciation.

#1029

Wolfgang Wickler

Wolfgang Wickler

#28552

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Wolfgang Wickler is a German zoologist, behavioral researcher and author. He led the ethological department of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology from 1974, and he took over as director of the institute in 1975. Even after he was given emeritus status, he remained closely associated to the institute in Seewiesen and ensured its smooth transition under the newly created Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

#1030

Ralf J. Sommer

#35815

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Ralf Josef Sommer is a German biologist specializing in evolutionary developmental biology. Scientific career Sommer studied biology at the RWTH Aachen University, at the University of Tübingen and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he obtained his Diplom degree in 1989 and earned his Ph.D. in the lab of Diethard Tautz on a study of the evolution of segmentation genes in insects in 1992. His work was one of the first molecular studies in the field of evolutionary developmental biology , a discipline that started its revival in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From 1993-1995 he was a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

#1031

Nikolay Dubinin

#28125

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Nikolay Petrovich Dubinin was a Soviet and Russian biologist and academician. He worked under the supervision of Sergei Chetverikov. He was a Corresponding Member of the Division of Biological Sciences from 1946 and Academician of the Division of the General Biology from 1966.

#1032

Leslie Brent

#21761

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Leslie Baruch Brent was a British immunologist and zoologist. He was Professor Emeritus, University of London, from 1990. An immunologist, he was the co-discoverer, with Peter Medawar and Rupert Billingham, of acquired immunological tolerance. They injected cells from donor mice into fetal mice, and later neonatal mice, which would as adults receive donor skin grafts without rejection.

#1033

Joseph T. Collins

#16890

Overall Influence

1938 - 2012 (74 years)

Joseph Thomas Collins, Jr. was an American herpetologist. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, Collins authored 27 books and over 300 articles on wildlife, of which about 250 were on amphibians and reptiles. He was the founder of the Center for North American Herpetology . He died while studying amphibians and reptiles on St. George Island, Florida on 14 January 2012. "For 60 years I was obsessed with herpetology," Joe Collins claimed.

#1034

Dennis Bray

#30386

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Dennis Bray is an active emeritus professor at University of Cambridge. His group is also part of the Oxford Centre for Integrative Systems Biology. After a first career in Neurobiology, working on cell growth and movement, Dennis Bray moved in Cambridge to develop computational models of cell signaling, in particular in relation to bacterial chemotaxis.

#1035

Pamela Ronald

#14832

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Pamela Christine Ronald is an American plant pathologist and geneticist. She is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. In 2018 she served as a visiting professor at Stanford University in the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

#1036

Daniel K. Riskin

Daniel K. Riskin

#25642

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Daniel K. Riskin is a Canadian evolutionary biologist, television personality and producer. He hosted the Canadian television series Daily Planet. Early life and education He was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. He received a BSc in zoology from the University of Alberta, an MSc in biology from York University, and a PhD in zoology from Cornell University. He also completed post-doctoral studies at Boston University and Brown University.

#1037

Milton Wainwright

#16237

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Milton Wainwright is a British microbiologist who is known for his research into what he claims could be extraterrestrial life found in the stratosphere. Biography Wainwright graduated from the University of Nottingham in the field of botany. He obtained a PhD from the same university in the field of mycology. From 1974-1975 he went to the National Research Council of Canada as postdoctoral fellow, where he obtained a qualification in environmental microbiology. From 1975-1986, he was a Lecturer in Microbiology at the University of Sheffield.

#1038

Julia Polak

#25984

Overall Influence

1939 - 2014 (75 years)

Dame Julia Margaret Polak, was an Argentine-born Polish pathologist who lived in England. She was head of the Centre for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at Imperial College London, a centre for medical research she set up with Larry Hench, also from Imperial College, to develop cells and tissues for transplantation into humans.

#1039

Marc Hauser

#12138

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Marc D. Hauser is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior, animal cognition and human behavior and neuroscience. Hauser was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1998 to 2011. In 2010 Harvard found him guilty of research misconduct, specifically fabricating and falsifying data, after which he resigned. Because Hauser's research was financed by government grants, the Office of Research Integrity of the Health and Human Services Department also investigated, finding in 2012 that Hauser had fabricated data, manipulated experimental results, and pub...

#1040

John Hudson Bowlby

#38024

Overall Influence

#1041

Spencer Wells

#12441

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Spencer Wells is an American geneticist, anthropologist, author and entrepreneur. He co-hosts The Insight podcast with Razib Khan. Wells led The Genographic Project from 2005 to 2015, as an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, and is the founder and executive director of personal genomics nonprofit The Insitome Institute.

#1042

Michel Lazdunski

#19681

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Michel Lazdunski is a French biologist specializing in biochemistry, physiology, pathophysiology, molecular pharmacology and neuroscience. Biography Michel Lazdunski is a chemical engineer , graduate of the École nationale supérieure de chimie de Clermont-Ferrand, PhD in Chemistry-Physics from Laval University in Quebec City in Canada in the laboratory of Ludovic Ouellet, then PhD in Biochemistry . He began his career at the CNRS in 1962 in Marseille where he became Professor of Biochemistry in 1965.He accepted the Chair of Biochemistry at the University of Nice in 1968. He founded the CNR...

#1043

Steven E. Brenner

Steven E. Brenner

#26706

Overall Influence

Steven Elliot Brenner is a professor at the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California Berkeley, adjunct professor at the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, and San Francisco Faculty scientist, Physical Biosciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

#1044

Stuart B. Levy

#28635

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Stuart Blank Levy was a researcher and physician at Tufts University. He was among the first to advocate for greater awareness of antibiotic resistance and founded the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics.

#1045

Yehuda Shoenfeld

Yehuda Shoenfeld

#20499

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Yehuda Shoenfeld is an Israeli physician and autoimmunity researcher. Biography Yehuda Shoenfeld works at Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer and the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the incumbent of the Laura Schwarz-Kipp Chair for Research of Autoimmune Diseases. Shoenfeld is the editor of two journals, Harefuah in Hebrew with English abstracts and Israel Medical Association Journal . He is co-editor-in-chief of Autoimmunity Reviews, and co-editor of the Journal of Autoimmunity, and member of the editorial board of...

#1046

Rodolfo Coria

#18748

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Rodolfo Aníbal Coria , is an Argentine paleontologist. He is best known for having directed the field study and co-naming of Argentinosaurus in 1993, and Giganotosaurus , in 1996 among other landmark South American dinosaurs, including Mapusaurus, Aucasaurus, and Quilmesaurus. He is a member of the Argentine Paleontological Association, Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Paleontological Society and The Explorers Club.

#1047

Jacques Miller

#19803

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Jacques Francis Albert Pierre Miller AC FRS FAA is a French-Australian research scientist. He is known for having discovered the function of the thymus and for the identification, in mammalian species of the two major subsets of lymphocytes and their function.

#1048

E. J. H. Corner

#28717

Overall Influence

1906 - 1996 (90 years)

Edred John Henry Corner FRS was an English mycologist and botanist who occupied the posts of assistant director at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and Professor of Tropical Botany at the University of Cambridge . Corner was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College from 1959.

#1049

Louise Chow

#17983

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Louise Tsi Chow is a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a foreign associate with the National Academy of Sciences, known for her research on the human papillomavirus. Her research contributed to the discovery of gene splicing, and in 1993, her collaborator, Richard J. Roberts, received the Nobel Prize for the research, leading some to assert that Chow should have received the honor as well.

#1050

Ruth Patrick

#18058

Overall Influence

1907 - 2013 (106 years)

Ruth Myrtle Patrick was an American botanist and limnologist specializing in diatoms and freshwater ecology. She authored more than 200 scientific papers, developed ways to measure the health of freshwater ecosystems and established numerous research facilities.

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