The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#11801

David. B. Neale

#154440
Overall Influence
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#11802

Mokhtar H. Gado

#154447
Overall Influence
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#11803

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen

#77365
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is director and Professor at the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids , and a professor of the Chemistry & Biochemistry department at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on organic electronic devices, using optical, electrical, and structural techniques to understand materials and devices such as photovoltaics, LEDs, and field-effect transistors.
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#11804

Amanda Elizabeth Inn Proudfoot

#154464
Overall Influence
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#11805

Erinna Lee

#111910
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Erinna Lee is a Singaporean molecular biologist specializing in apoptosis and autophagy. Early life and education Erinna Lee was born in Singapore and moved to Australia after high school. She was educated at University of Melbourne, studying a BSc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from 2000-2004. She studied her PhD at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, which was awarded in 2007 by the University of Melbourne. It was during this PhD where she began research on programmed cell death, which would form a large part of her subsequent research career.
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#11806

Juliet Daniel

#104246
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Juliet M Daniel is a Barbadian-born Canadian biology professor at McMaster University, where her research focuses on cancer biology. Daniel is recognized in the cancer biology field for the discovery and naming of the gene Kaiso, and is the recipient of several prestigious awards in recognition of her research and leadership, including an Ontario Premier Research Excellence Award and a Vice-Chancellor Award from the University of the West Indies.
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#11807

J. B. Legall

#154484
Overall Influence
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#11808

Howard A. Crum

#154486
Overall Influence
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#11809

Sean Whelan

#103393
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Sean Whelan is a British-American virologist. He is known for identifying the cellular protein used as a receptor by Ebola virus, for defining the entry pathway that rabies virus uses to enter neurons, and for identifying the ribosome as a possible target for antiviral drugs. In July 2019, he was announced as the new Chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri. In February 2020, Whelan was recognized as the LGBTQ+ Scientist of the Year 2020 by the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professio...
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#11810

Joseph L. Reid

#104915
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Joseph L. Reid was an American oceanographer. He was professor emeritus of physical oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Further reading
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#11811

Valeria Culotta

#149961
Overall Influence
Valeria Cizewski Culotta is an American molecular biologist. Early life and education Culotta was born and raised in Maryland, where she graduated from Havre De Grace High School in 1975. She then completed her PhD in 1987 at Johns Hopkins University and her postdoctoral training in molecular biology at the National Cancer Institute.
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#11812

David Edwards

#154514
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
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#11813

Richard Kingsford

#152449
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Richard Kingsford is an environmental/biological expert and river ecologist. Much of his work has been undertaken with the Murray-Darling Basin wetlands and rivers covering approximately 70 percent of the Australian continent. He is the director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of New South Wales School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, a member of the Australian Government’s Environmental Flows Scientific Committee. He has received the following awards:2001: Eureka Award for his research on ecological values of rivers and impact of Australia’s water resour...
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#11814

Klaus Seppi

#154518
Overall Influence
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#11815

Ulf Hellman

#154520
Overall Influence
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#11816

Raymonds A. Evans

#154523
Overall Influence
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#11817

Allison K. Shaw

#135749
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Allison K. Shaw is an American ecologist and professor at the University of Minnesota. She studies the factors that drive the movements of organisms. Early life and education Shaw grew up among a family of physicists; her parents, siblings, and some of her grandparents were involved in the field of physics, so she was exposed to the sciences from a young age. She received her bachelor's degree in Science in Applied Mathematics-Biology from Brown University in 2006, and went on to earn her master's degree in ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2009. She continued her graduate studies at Princeton, and earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2012.
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#11818

Horst Tobias Witt

#154528
Overall Influence
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#11819

Rachel Dutton

Rachel Dutton
#111149
Overall Influence
Rachel Dutton is an American microbiologist. She has developed the microorganisms that live on cheese into a model system for complex interacting microbial communities. She has worked with chefs including Dan Felder, head of research and development at Momofuku to develop new fermentation procedures to be used in food and has been called the "go-to microbiologist" for chefs and gastronomists.
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#11820

Peter. V. Danenberg

#154534
Overall Influence
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#11821

Klaus Thurau

#154536
Overall Influence
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#11822

Ralph L. Obendorf

#148992
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ralph Louis Obendorf is an Emeritus Professor of Crop Physiology at Cornell University who is notable for his research on the health-related components in seeds, particularly fagopyritol A1, which is isosteric to an insulin mediator believed to be deficient in subjects with non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus and polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects 10% of women of reproductive age.
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#11823

Laurence Joseph Wheat

#154547
Overall Influence
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#11824

Colleen Nelson

#78815
Overall Influence
Professor Colleen Nelson is a scientist in prostate cancer research. Professor Nelson founded and directs the Australian Prostate Cancer Research Centre - Queensland . The Centre, based at the Translational Research Institute and the Princess Alexandra Hospital, spans the spectrum of discovery of new therapeutic targets and their preclinical and clinical development. Professor Nelson is also Chair of Prostate Cancer Research at Queensland University of Technology .
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#11825

Johan Lindenbaum

#154560
Overall Influence
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#11826

Eugene J. Kamprath

#154564
Overall Influence
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#11827

Evan Y. Snyder

#154565
Overall Influence
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#11828

Nenad Ban

#154568
Overall Influence
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#11829

K. Christopher Smith

#154576
Overall Influence
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#11830

Elizabeth Derryberry

#124493
Overall Influence
Dr. Elizabeth Derryberry is an associate professor specializing in ornithology, in the Department of Ecology and Environmental Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee.
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#11831

Katsuyuki Aozasa

#154587
Overall Influence
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#11832

Ulf Büntgen

#154595
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
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#11833

Richard G. Weleber

#154596
Overall Influence
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#11834

Ryosuke Takahashi

#154601
Overall Influence
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#11835

John M. Pawelek

#154610
Overall Influence
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#11836

P. David Polly

#122542
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Paul David Polly is an American paleontologist and the Robert R. Shrock Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Indiana University as well as the sitting chair of the department.
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#11837

Bruce D. Patterson

#154641
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
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#11838

Dr. Dominique Aunis

#154642
Overall Influence
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#11839

Jonathan Austyn

#145508
Overall Influence
Jonathan M. Austyn is Professor of Immunobiology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He has taught immunology over many years, and designed the Master of Science course in Integrated Immunology at the University of Oxford, which he co-directs.
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#11840

Ernst Steudle

#154654
Overall Influence
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#11841

Richard F. Keeler

#154667
Overall Influence
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#11842

Francisco J. Varela

#154675
Overall Influence
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#11843

Frederick W. L. Kerr

#154693
Overall Influence
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#11844

Kate Jeffery

Kate Jeffery
#126599
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Kathryn Jane Jeffery is a neuroscientist from New Zealand. She is a professor of behavioural neuroscience at University College London. She studies how the brain encodes three-dimensional and complex space, and the role of this representation in spatial cognition and navigation.
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#11845

Ernesto Medina

#154699
Overall Influence
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#11846

Lee Altenberg

#105731
Overall Influence
Lee Altenberg is an American theoretical biologist. He is on the faculty of the Departments of Information and Computer Sciences and of Mathematics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is best known for his work that helped establish the evolution of evolvability and modularity in the genotype–phenotype map as areas of investigation in evolutionary biology, for moving theoretical concepts between the fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary computation, and for his mathematical unification and generalization of modifier gene models for the evolution of biological information transm...
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#11847

Arnaud Estoup

#154720
Overall Influence
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#11848

Helge Bruelheide

#154723
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
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#11849

A. David Redish

#154727
Overall Influence
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#11850

Hermann W. D. Katinger

#154732
Overall Influence
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