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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School

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1151

Stylianos Antonarakis

Stylianos Antonarakis

#28142

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Stylianos E. Antonarakis is a Greece-born human geneticist. Antonarakis is Professor of Genetic Medicine at the University of Geneva Medical School in Switzerland. From 2012 to 2017 he was the director of the iGE3 institute of Genetics and Genomics in Geneva, which he co-founded. He is the President of the Human Genome Organization , a member of the scientific council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and chair of the Genetics panel of the European Research Council. Previously he was the President of the European Society of Human Genetics.

#1152

Armand de Ricqlès

#28952

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Armand de Ricqlès is a French paleontologist best known for his work in bone histology and its implications for the growth of dinosaurs . Biography Early life He was born on 23 December 1938 in Brussels, Belgium. He obtained his first university degree in natural sciences from the University of Paris in 1960, and his doctorate in 1963. His thesis was supervised by Marcel Prenant, and focused on histology.

#1153

Gary Stormo

#31656

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gary Stormo is an American geneticist and currently Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He is considered one of the pioneers of bioinformatics and genomics. His research combines experimental and computational approaches in order to identify and predict regulatory sequences in DNA and RNA, and their contributions to the regulatory networks that control gene expression.

#1154

John Terborgh

#20262

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

John Whittle Terborgh is a James B. Duke Professor of Environmental Science at Duke University and Co-Director of the Center for Tropical Conservation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and for the past thirty-five years, has been actively involved in tropical ecology and conservation issues. An authority on avian and mammalian ecology in Neotropical forests, Terborgh has published numerous articles and books on conservation themes. Since 1973, he has operated the Cocha Cashu Biological Station, a tropical ecology research station in Manú National Park, Peru.

#1155

Jacques Balthazart

Jacques Balthazart

#14230

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jacques Balthazart is a Belgian biologist who specializes in behavioral neuroendocrinology, author of multiple publications and working at the University of Liège. He is currently director emeritus of the Research Group in Behavioral Neurobiology at the GIGA Neurosciences of the University of Liège.

#1156

Deborah Charlesworth

#37234

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Deborah Charlesworth is a population geneticist from the UK, notable for her important discoveries in population genetics and evolutionary biology. Her most notable research is in understanding the evolution of recombination, sex chromosomes and mating system for plants.

#1157

Walle Nauta

#21224

Overall Influence

1916 - 1994 (78 years)

Walle Jetze Harinx Nauta was a leading Dutch-American neuroanatomist, and one of the founders of the field of neuroscience. Nauta is best known for his silver staining, which helped to revolutionize neuroscience. He was an Institute Professor of neuroscience at MIT and also worked at the University of Utrecht, the University of Zurich, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the University of Maryland. In addition, he was a founder and president of the Society for Neuroscience.

#1158

Robert Gentleman

Robert Gentleman

#9026

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Robert Clifford Gentleman is a Canadian statistician and bioinformatician who is currently the founding executive director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School. He was previously the vice president of computational biology at 23andMe. Gentleman is recognized, along with Ross Ihaka, as one of the originators of the R programming language and the Bioconductor project.

#1159

James Tiedje

#38774

Overall Influence

James Michael Tiedje is University Distinguished Professor and the director of the NSF Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, as well as a Professor of Crop and Soil Sciences and Microbiology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 and served as president of the American Society for Microbiology from 2004 to 2005. The Center he directed developed novel methods for microbial community analysis that have greatly expanded knowledge about complex microbial communities in soil, sediments, engineered systems, the oceans and within animals. He also created e...

#1160

Graham Cairns-Smith

#25793

Overall Influence

1931 - 2016 (85 years)

Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith FRSE was an organic chemist and molecular biologist at the University of Glasgow. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he gained a Ph.D. in Chemistry . He was most famous for his controversial 1985 book Seven Clues to the Origin of Life.

#1161

Alexander A. Clerk

#21357

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Alexander Adu Clerk, is a Ghanaian American academic, psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist who was the Director of the world's first sleep medical clinic, the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine from 1990 to 1998. Clerk is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

#1162

Mark O'Shea

#19459

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark Timothy O'Shea is an English herpetologist, photographer, author, lecturer, and television personality. He is known internationally as the presenter of the Animal Planet/Discovery Channel series O'Shea's Big Adventure.

#1163

Huda Akil

#14470

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Huda Akil is a Syrian–American neuroscientist whose pioneering research has contributed to the understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, including pain, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Akil and colleagues are best known for providing the first physiological evidence for a role of endorphins in the brain and demonstrating that endorphins are activated by stress and can cause pain inhibition.

#1164

Mitchell Sogin

#30166

Overall Influence

Mitchell Sogin is an American microbiologist. He is a distinguished senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His research investigates the evolution and diversity of single-celled organisms.

#1165

John P. Allen

#8946

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

John Polk Allen is a systems ecologist, engineer, metallurgist, adventurer, and writer. Allen is a proponent of the science of biospherics and a pioneer in sustainable co-evolutionary development. He is the founder of Synergia Ranch, and is best known as the inventor and director of research of Biosphere 2, the world's largest vivarium and research facility to study global ecology. Biosphere 2 set multiple records in closed ecological systems work, including degree of sealing tightness, 100% waste and water recycle, and duration of human residence within a closed system . He is also involved ...

#1166

R. J. Berry

#26134

Overall Influence

1934 - 2018 (84 years)

Robert James "Sam" Berry was a British geneticist, naturalist and Christian theorist. He was professor of genetics at University College London between 1974 and 2000. Before that he was a lecturer in genetics at The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London. He was president from 1983 to 1986 of the Linnean Society, the British Ecological Society and the European Ecological Federation. As a Christian, Berry spoke out in favour of theistic evolution, served as a lay member of the Church of England's General Synod and as president of Christians in Science. He was a member of the Board of Governors of Monkton Combe School from 1979 to 1991.

#1167

Montgomery Slatkin

#33142

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Montgomery Wilson Slatkin is an American biologist, and professor at University of California, Berkeley. Education Slatkin received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD from Harvard University.

#1168

Henry Gee

#20449

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Henry Ernest Gee is a British paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and senior editor of the scientific journal Nature. Early life and education Gee attended Park Hill Junior School for a short time around 1973. Gee attended Sevenoaks School as a boarder. He then attended the Michael Hall School. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Leeds and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1990 as a postgraduate student of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His doctoral research investigated the evolution of bison in Britain in the Ice Age.

#1169

John Tileston Edsall

#24411

Overall Influence

1902 - 2002 (100 years)

John Tileston Edsall was a protein scientist, who contributed significantly to the understanding of the hydrophobic interaction. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

#1170

Daniel Wolpert

#22118

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Daniel Mark Wolpert FRS FMedSci is a British medical doctor, neuroscientist and engineer, who has made important contributions in computational biology. He was Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge from 2005, and also became the Royal Society Noreen Murray Research Professorship in Neurobiology from 2013. He is now Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University.

#1171

Minoru Kanehisa

#27334

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Minoru Kanehisa is a Japanese bioinformatician. He is a project professor at Kyoto University, technical director of Pathway Solutions Inc and president of NPO Bioinformatics Japan. He is one of Japan's most recognized and respected bioinformatics experts and is known for developing the KEGG bioinformatics database.

#1172

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte

#14644

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte is a Spanish biochemist and developmental biologist. He is a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratories at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California since 1993.

#1173

Tyson R. Roberts

#30391

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Tyson Royal Roberts is an American ichthyologist. He has been described as "the world's foremost authority on Regalecus". Roberts attended Stanford University, where he earned his B.A. in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1968. His doctoral thesis was titled "Studies on the osteology and phylogeny of characoid fishes." He won a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of "Organismic Biology & Ecology", and is a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and is also affiliated to the Institute of Molecular Biosciences of Mahidol University, Thailand.

#1174

Patricia Adair Gowaty

#36573

Overall Influence

Patricia Adair Gowaty is an American evolutionary biologist. She received her B.A. in biology at Tulane University and her PhD in zoology at Clemson University in 1980. She is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

#1175

David C. Page

#24966

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

David C. Page is an American biologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , the director of the Whitehead Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is best known for his work on mapping the Y-chromosome and on its evolution in mammals and expression during development. He was cited by Bryan Sykes in Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men.

#1176

Pascal Godefroit

#28535

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Pascal Godefroit is a Belgian paleontologist. He discovered dinosaurs like Olorotitan in 2003. Godefroit is the director of earth and life sciences at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.

#1177

Ying Xu

#15190

Overall Influence

Ying Xu is a computational biologist and bioinformatician, and a chair professor under the title 'Regents-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar' in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Institute of Bioinformatics at the University of Georgia, USA.

#1178

Platon Kostiuk

#23680

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Platon Hryhorovych Kostiuk was a Soviet and Ukrainian physiologist, neurobiologist, electrophysiologist, and biophysicist. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was also a director of the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology and the International Center of Molecular Physiology NAS of Ukraine; chair of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Kyiv branch, vice-president of the NAS of Ukraine, and chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR.

#1179

Johannes Holtfreter

#34766

Overall Influence

1901 - 1992 (91 years)

Johannes Holtfreter was a German-American developmental biologist whose primary focus was the “organizer,” a part of the embryo essential for the development of the proper body plan. Biography Holtfreter was born on January 9, 1901, in Richtenberg, Pomerania, Germany, as the only son and second out of three children. As a child, he captured animals and made drawings of them, and after graduating from the Realgymnasium, he wanted to enter field biology. Upon beginning this path at the University of Rostock and the University of Leipzig, he eventually moved to the University of Freiburg to study under Doflein, a famous naturalist who died soon after Holtfreter transferred.

#1180

James L. Gould

#40395

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

James L. Gould is an American ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and popular science writer. He has served as a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University since receiving his PhD in 1975. However, he is primarily known for the experiment he designed while an undergraduate at Caltech which proved that bees use complex dances to communicate the location of food. In addition to several technical works and textbooks, he co-wrote with his wife the popular science book The Honey Bee.

#1181

Joan Slonczewski

Joan Slonczewski

#11430

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Their books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: A Door into Ocean and The Highest Frontier . With John W. Foster and Erik Zinser, they coauthor the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science now in its fifth edition. They explore ideas of biology, politics, and artificial intelligence at their blog Ultraphyte.

#1182

Nancy Kanwisher

#13249

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.

#1183

Richard Frackowiak

#39067

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Richard Stanislaus Joseph Frackowiak, born 26 March 1950 in London, is a British and French neurologist and neuroscientist. He is best known for his role in the development of neuroimaging, as the founding director of the Functional Imaging Laboratory at University College London and as one of the initiators, in 2013, of the Human Brain Project , a ten-year European project coordinated by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne with the goal of advancing knowledge in the fields of neuroscience, computing and brain-related medicine.

#1184

Shang Fa Yang

#23347

Overall Influence

1932 - 2007 (75 years)

Shang Fa Yang was a Taiwanese-American botanist. He was a professor at the University of California, Davis. He was awarded the 1991 Wolf Prize in Agriculture and was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences the year before.

#1185

Mark S. Cohen

#7865

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark Steven Cohen is an American neuroscientist and early pioneer of functional brain imaging using magnetic resonance imaging. He currently is a Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, Radiology, Psychology, Biomedical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He is also a performing musician.

#1186

Frank Bradke

#29932

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Frank Bradke is a German neurobiologist who works on the physiological regeneration of nerve cells in the central nervous system. In 2016, he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his "pioneering research in the field of regenerative neurobiology." He is currently a Group Leader at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. He is a member of the Editorial Board for Current Biology.

#1187

Lennart Philipson

#34022

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Carl Lennart Philipson was a Swedish virologist and professor at Karolinska Institute. He is well known for his research in respiratory viruses and his direction over several research institutions. Career Philipson earned his MD in 1957 and PhD in 1958 at Uppsala University, working with Arne Tiselius. He came to the United States in 1959 to do a postdoc at the Rockefeller University in virology, before returning to Sweden's Uppsala University to establish his own laboratory in 1961 with Jan Pontén.

#1188

Horace Winchell Magoun

#24077

Overall Influence

1907 - 1991 (84 years)

Horace Winchell Magoun was a medical researcher. studied medicine first at the Rhode Island State College and the Syracuse University, graduating in medicine in 1931. In 1934 earned a Ph.D. in anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine Northwestern University, and remained in it first as a university assistant and then as professor of microscopic anatomy . In 1948, in collaboration with the Italian neurophysiologist Giuseppe Moruzzi, Magoun identified the brain center responsible for the state of sleep: electrical stimulation of the brain stem, by Moruzzi and Magoun found a link between the station cerebellum and motor cortex, producing EEG waves typical of a state of intense supervision.

#1189

Oliver Rackham

#12236

Overall Influence

1939 - 2015 (76 years)

Oliver Rackham was an academic at the University of Cambridge who studied the ecology, management and development of the British countryside, especially trees, woodlands and wood pasture. His books included Ancient Woodland and The History of the Countryside .

#1190

José Sarukhán Kermez

#22784

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

José Sarukhán Kermez is a plant biologist and ecologist. He is currently the National Coordinator for Mexico’s National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity . He received a B.A. from National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1964, a Masters from Postgraduate College , and a Ph.D. from the University of Wales. A known expert in the biodiversity of Mexico, Sarukhán’s main interests include tropical ecology, plant population ecology, and the systems ecology of both temperate and tropical ecosystems, as well as training and education. He has published over 110 research papers and...

#1191

Carl Wunsch

#24795

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Carl Wunsch was the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, until he retired in 2013. He is known for his early work in internal waves and more recently for research into the effects of ocean circulation on climate.

#1192

Jere H. Lipps

#21648

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Jere Henry Lipps is Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, and Curator of Paleontology at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Lipps was the ninth Director of the museum and chair of the department of Integrative Biology at Berkeley . He served as president of the Paleontological Society in 1997, and the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research Inc. three times

#1193

Godfrey Hewitt

#27087

Overall Influence

1940 - 2013 (73 years)

Godfrey Matthew Hewitt was a British professor and evolutionary geneticist at the University of East Anglia who was very influential in the development of the fields of molecular ecology, phylogeography, speciation and hybridisation.

#1194

Harry B. Whittington

#14229

Overall Influence

1916 - 2010 (94 years)

Harry Blackmore Whittington FRS was a British palaeontologist who made a major contribution to the study of fossils of the Burgess Shale and other Cambrian fauna. His works are largely responsible for the concept of Cambrian explosion, whereby modern animal body plans are explained to originate during a short span of geological period. With initial work on trilobites, his discoveries revealed that these arthropods were the most diversified of all invertebrates during the Cambrian Period. He was responsible for setting the standard for naming and describing the delicate fossils preserved in Ko...

#1195

Irving London

#18601

Overall Influence

1918 - 2018 (100 years)

Irving M. London was a hematologist and geneticist. He was an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons when he was selected to be the founding chair of the department of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1955. He was recruited to become the founding director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology in 1970. Dr. London was the first professor to hold dual roles at both Harvard and MIT.

#1196

Deborah Mowshowitz

Deborah Mowshowitz

#29677

Overall Influence

Deborah Mowshowitz is an American biochemist and a Professor of Biology and Director of Undergraduate Programs and Lab Operations at Columbia University. Mowshowitz was trained in pure biochemistry and has done research in RNA processing. In her early work she focused on pedagogy and biology education.

#1197

Robert D. Schreiber

Robert D. Schreiber

#34308

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Robert D. Schreiber is an immunologist and currently is the Alumni Endowed Professor of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine. Schreiber has led a major revision in our understanding of how the immune system interacts with cancer. His work on the cancer immunoediting hypothesis has helped reveal that the immune system is not only capable of destroying cancers, but can also drive them into a dormant state that, in some cases, results in an improved state of malignancy.

#1198

Angelika Amon

#32031

Overall Influence

1967 - 2020 (53 years)

Angelika Amon was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

#1199

George Yancopoulos

#21111

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

George D. Yancopoulos is a Greek-American biomedical scientist who is the co-founder, president and chief scientific officer of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Yancopoulos is the holder of more than 100 patents. He is a principal inventor and developer of Regeneron's ten FDA-approved or -authorized treatments, as well as of Regeneron's foundational technologies for target and drug development, such as its proprietary TRAP technology, and the VelociGene and VelocImmune antibody technologies.

#1200

Hidde Ploegh

#34153

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Hidde Lolke Ploegh is an immunologist at Boston Children's Hospital, known for his contributions in understanding antigen processing and the evasion of the immune system by viruses. Career and education Ploegh, a native of the Netherlands, received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1975, and a Master of Science degree in biology and chemistry in 1977, from the University of Groningen. Having worked for six months in Jack Strominger's lab at that time, he was able to continue his PhD studies under Strominger and received a doctorate from the University of Leiden. Ploegh would then go on to hold ...

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