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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1201

Lennart Olsson

#36315

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Lennart Olsson, born 1961, is a Swedish zoologist and embryologist, professor of comparative zoology at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. Olsson focuses his research primarily on the embryological development of the vertebrate head. He is also a major contributor to the history of ideas in comparative anatomy.

#1202

Charles F. Stevens

#20421

Overall Influence

1934 - 2022 (88 years)

Charles F. "Chuck" Stevens was an American neurobiologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. He was the Vincent J. Coates Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and adjunct professor of pharmacology and neuroscience at UCSD's School of Medicine. He was also an external professor and member of the science board at the Santa Fe Institute and a general member of the Aspen Center for Physics.

#1203

Joe M. McCord

#25777

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Joe Milton McCord is an American biochemist. While serving as a graduate student, he and his supervisor Irwin Fridovich were the first to describe the enzymatic activity of superoxide dismutase. McCord joined the board of directors of the LifeVantage Corporation in 2006, serving as the company's chief science officer from 2011 to 2012, and retired from the company in June 2013.

#1204

Daniel Weinberger

#38832

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Daniel R. Weinberger is a professor of psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and Director and CEO of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, which opened in 2011. Life He is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and completed two residencies, one in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and another in neurology at George Washington University.

#1205

V. S. Ramachandran

V. S. Ramachandran

#7332

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran is an Indian-American neuroscientist. He is known for his wide-ranging experiments and theories in behavioral neurology, including the invention of the mirror box. Ramachandran is a distinguished professor in UCSD's Department of Psychology, where he is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition.

#1206

Dale Purves

#24821

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Dale Purves is Geller Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences where he remains Research Professor with additional appointments in the department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, and the department of Philosophy at Duke University. He earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1960 and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1964. After further clinical training as a surgical resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital, service as a Peace Corps physician, and postdoctoral training at Harvard and University College London, he was appointed to the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in 1973.

#1207

Michel Laurin

#32352

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Michel Laurin is a Canadian-born French vertebrate paleontologist whose specialities include the emergence of a land-based lifestyle among vertebrates, the evolution of body size and the origin and phylogeny of lissamphibians. He has also made important contributions to the literature on phylogenetic nomenclature.

#1208

Harry W. Greene

#35465

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Harry W. Greene is an American herpetologist, who retired in 2016 after working for many years as a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University. Early life Greene achieved a B.S. in Biology at Texas Wesleyan University in 1968, an M.A. in Biology from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1973, and a PhD in Zoology from the University of Tennessee in 1977. He worked as a US Army medic in Germany in 1968-1971.

#1209

Antonio Lanzavecchia

#20159

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Antonio Lanzavecchia is an Italian and Swiss immunologist. As a fellow of Collegio Borromeo he obtained a degree with honors in Medicine in 1976 from the University of Pavia where he specialized in Pediatrics and Infectious Diseases. He is Head Human Immunology Program, Istituto Nazionale di Genetica Molecolare-INGM, Milan and SVP Senior research Fellow, Humabs/Vir Biotechnology, Bellinzona and San Francisco . Since 2017, he is also Professor at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences of the Università della Svizzera italiana .

#1210

Robert Turner

#14566

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Robert Turner is a British neuroscientist, physicist, and social anthropologist. He has been a director and professor at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in brain physics and magnetic resonance imaging . Coils inside every MRI scanner owe their shape to his ideas.

#1211

Maiken Nedergaard

#29615

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Maiken Nedergaard is a Danish neuroscientist most well known for discovering the glymphatic system. She is a jointly appointed professor in the Departments of Neuroscience and Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. She holds a part-time appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery within the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine, where she is the principal investigator of the Division of Glial Disease and Therapeutics laboratory. She is also Professor of Glial Cell Biology at the University of Copenhagen, Center for Translational Neuromedicine.

#1212

Mien-Chie Hung

#21038

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Mien-Chie Hung is a Taiwanese-born American molecular biologist and cancer researcher. He is a Professor and Chair, Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

#1213

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

#21120

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is an historian of science who comes from Liechtenstein. He was director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 1997 to 2014. His focus areas within the history of science are the history and epistemology of the experiment, and further the history of molecular biology and protein biosynthesis. Additionally he writes and publicizes essays and poems.

#1214

Jonathan D. G. Jones

#27765

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jonathan Dallas George Jones is a senior scientist at the Sainsbury Laboratory and a professor at the University of East Anglia using molecular and genetic approaches to study disease resistance in plants.

#1215

James J. Bull

#30190

Overall Influence

James Jeffrey Bull is Johann Friedrich Miescher Regents Professor in Molecular Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known for his influential 1983 monograph, Evolution of Sex Determining Mechanisms.

#1216

Rebecca L. Cann

#33852

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rebecca L. Cann is a geneticist who made a scientific breakthrough on mitochondrial DNA variation and evolution in humans, popularly called Mitochondrial Eve. Her discovery that all living humans are genetically descended from a single African mother who lived <200,000 years ago became the foundation of the Out of Africa theory, the most widely accepted explanation of the origin of all modern humans. She is currently Professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

#1217

Michael Lynch

#28016

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Michael Lynch is the Director of the Biodesign Institute for Mechanisms of Evolution at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. Biography He held a Distinguished Professorship of Evolution, Population Genetics and Genomics at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Besides over 250 papers, especially in population genetics, he has written a two volume textbook with Bruce Walsh. Alongside this textbook he has also published two other books. He promotes neutral theories to explain genomic architecture based on the effects of population sizes in different lineages; he presented this point of view in his 2007 book "The Origins of Genome Architecture".

#1218

Søren Brunak

#23684

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Søren Brunak is a Danish biological and physical scientist working in bioinformatics, systems biology, and medical informatics. He is a professor of Disease Systems Biology at the University of Copenhagen and professor of bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark. As Research Director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen Medical School, he leads a research effort where molecular-level systems biology data are combined with phenotypic data from the healthcare sector, such as electronic patient records, registry information, and biobank questionnaires.

#1219

Ron Appel

#28525

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Ron David Appel is a Swiss bioinformatician, professor of proteomics and bioinformatics at the University of Geneva and executive director of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Education Ron Appel graduated in Computer Sciences at the University of Geneva, where he also received his Ph.D in 1987, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard School of Public Health.

#1220

Desmond G. Higgins

Desmond G. Higgins

#35540

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Desmond Gerard Higgins is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College Dublin, widely known for CLUSTAL, a series of computer programs for performing multiple sequence alignment. According to Nature, Higgins' papers describing CLUSTAL are among the top ten most highly cited scientific papers of all time.

#1221

Ralf Reski

#26560

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Ralf Reski is a German professor of plant biotechnology and former dean of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Freiburg. He is also affiliated to the French École supérieure de biotechnologie Strasbourg and Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.

#1222

Don W. Fawcett

#33427

Overall Influence

1917 - 2009 (92 years)

Don Wayne Fawcett was a pioneer of electron microscopy and one of its greatest practitioners for studying the organization of cells and tissues. His greatest achievement was his description of the structure of spermatozoa and the male reproductive system.

#1223

Jay Keasling

#12040

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Jay D. Keasling is a professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also associate laboratory director for biosciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and chief executive officer of the Joint BioEnergy Institute. He is considered one of the foremost authorities in synthetic biology, especially in the field of metabolic engineering.

#1224

Wolf Reik

#36435

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Wolf Reik FRS is a German molecular biologist and a group leader at the Babraham Institute, honorary professor of Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge and associate faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He was announced as the director of Altos Labs Cambridge Institute when the company launched on 19 January 2022.

#1225

Stuart A. Aaronson

Stuart A. Aaronson

#26342

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Stuart A. Aaronson is an American author and cancer biologist. He has authored more than 500 publications and holds over 50 patents, and was the Jane B. and Jack R. Aron Professor of Neoplastic Diseases and Chairman of Oncological Sciences at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City until March 2013, when he assumed the title of Founding Chair Emeritus of the Department of Oncological Sciences. The current Chairman of Oncological Sciences is Ramon E. Parsons.

#1226

Mark Ridley

#23560

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark Ridley is a British zoologist and writer on evolution. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge in the 1980s , and later worked at Emory University. he worked as a research assistant at the Department of Zoology, Oxford University. Ridley has worked on the evolution of reproductive behaviour and written a number of popular accounts of evolutionary biology, including articles for the New York Times, The Sunday Times, Nature, New Scientist and The Times Literary Supplement. He is sometimes confused with Matt Ridley, another writer on evolution who is also from the UK.

#1227

Lawrence Witmer

#32026

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Lawrence M. Witmer is an American paleontologist and paleobiologist. He is a Professor of Anatomy and a Chang Ying-Chien Professor of Paleontology at the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio University. Witmer is considered to be one of the world's foremost experts on soft-tissue anatomy of the skull in extinct animals such as dinosaurs and pterosaurs. One of Witmer's largest contributions to vertebrate paleontology was the creation of the Extant Phylogenetic Bracket approach to ancestral character state reconstruction. This methodology inc...

#1228

Barbara Block

#24294

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Barbara Block is an American marine biologist and Charles & Elizabeth Prothro Professor of Biology in Marine Sciences at the Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station and a co-director of Stanford University's Tuna Research and Conservation Center, with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She has published numerous bodies of work throughout her career in marine biology and chemistry, mainly focusing on the biology and chemistry of metabolism in different tuna and shark species. Additionally, she has helped develop two new types of electronic tags for large pelagic predators in order to track the migra...

#1229

Gregory Petsko

#21613

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Gregory A. Petsko is an American biochemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is currently Professor of Neurology at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. He formerly had an endowed professorship in Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College and is still an adjunct professor of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University, and is also the Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor, Emeritus, in biochemistry and chemistry at Brandeis University.

#1230

Tim Mitchison

#36922

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Timothy John Mitchison is a cell biologist and systems biologist and Hasib Sabbagh Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in the United States. He is known for his discovery, with Marc Kirschner, of dynamic instability in microtubules, for studies of the mechanism of cell division, and for contributions to chemical biology.

#1231

Norbert Perrimon

#40079

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Norbert Perrimon is a French geneticist and developmental biologist. He is the James Stillman Professor of Developmental Biology in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an Associate of the Broad Institute. He is known for developing a number of techniques for used in genetic research with Drosophila melanogaster, as well as specific substantive contributions to signal transduction, developmental biology and physiology.

#1232

Anne Simon

#31671

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Anne Simon is an American biology professor, scientist, and a science advisor on the American television series The X-Files, both the original series for all nine seasons and the 2016 miniseries. The first episode of the original series that she provided science consultation on was the first-season finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask", which was telecast on May 13, 1994. She became involved with the series through her connection as a family friend of series creator Chris Carter. She wrote a 2001 book about the biological science of the show, The Real Science Behind the X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites a...

#1233

Allan C. Spradling

#33198

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Allan C. Spradling is an American scientist and principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who studies egg development in the model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, a fruit fly. He is considered a leading researcher in the developmental genetics of the fruit fly egg and has developed a number of techniques in his career that have led to greater understanding of fruit fly genetics including contributions to sequencing its genome. He is also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and at the Johns Hopkins University School of...

#1234

Bruno Lemaitre

#22095

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Bruno Lemaitre is a French immunologist and a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . His research focuses on the mechanisms of innate immunity and endosymbiosis in Drosophila. Lemaitre has also authored several books on the topic of narcissism in science. and a book on the philosophy of Michael Polanyi.

#1235

Carl Gans

#24135

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Carl Gans was a German-born American zoologist and herpetologist. He and Glen Northcutt proposed the provocative theory of "new head theory", opened up evolutionary developmental biology as a new discipline.

#1236

Thomas R. Holtz Jr.

#21294

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Thomas Richard Holtz Jr. is an American vertebrate palaeontologist, author, and principal lecturer at the University of Maryland's Department of Geology. He has published extensively on the phylogeny, morphology, ecomorphology, and locomotion of terrestrial predators, especially on tyrannosaurids and other theropod dinosaurs. He wrote the book Dinosaurs and is the author or co-author of the chapters "Saurischia", "Basal Tetanurae", and "Tyrannosauroidea" in the second edition of The Dinosauria. He has also been consulted as a scientific advisor for the Walking with Dinosaurs BBC series as wel...

#1237

Yuh Nung Jan

#32781

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Yuh Nung Jan is a Taiwanese-American neuroscientist. He is the Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Molecular Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he works together with his wife Lily Jan as co-PIs of the Jan Lab.

#1238

Erast Parmasto

#29617

Overall Influence

1928 - 2012 (84 years)

Erast Parmasto was a noted Estonian mycologist, bioscientist and botanist and onetime director of the Estonian Institute of Zoology and Botany. Parmasto was born in Nõmme. He became a member of the Estonian Institute of Zoology and Botany in 1950 and served as its director from 1985 to 1990. His establishment of a mushroom herbarium in 1950 has since seen recognition of 160,000 samples, 37,000 of which Parmasto himself collected.

#1239

Louise Johnson

#12097

Overall Influence

1940 - 2012 (72 years)

Dame Louise Napier Johnson, , was a British biochemist and protein crystallographer. She was David Phillips Professor of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford from 1990 to 2007, and later an emeritus professor.

#1240

Tibor Gánti

#22725

Overall Influence

1933 - 2009 (76 years)

Tibor Gánti was a Hungarian theoretical biologist and biochemist, who is best known for his theory of the chemoton, a model for defining the minimal nature of life. He taught industrial biochemistry at Faculty of Science of the Eötvös University, and theoretical biology at University of Gödöllő, József Attila University, and Eötvös University.

#1241

Anders Björklund

#36933

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Anders Björklund' is a Swedish neuroscientist and pioneer in the study of cell- and gene-based reparative and neuroprotective mechanisms in the brain. He has spent his academic career at Lund University in Sweden, as professor since 1983 and as senior professor at the Wallenberg Neuroscience Center since his formal retirement in 2012.

#1242

George Perry

#30410

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

George Perry is a professor of biology and chemistry at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the former dean of the College of Sciences. Perry is recognized in the field of Alzheimer's disease research, particularly for his work on oxidative stress.

#1243

Philippe Horvath

#22628

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Philippe Horvath is a French scientist working for DuPont Nutrition and Health. His work was integral to the development of CRISPR-Cas, a versatile biochemical method for targeted genetic engineering. For this work, he was awarded the 2015 Massry Prize along with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, as well as the 2016 Canada Gairdner International Award, with his Massry co-laureates in addition to Feng Zhang, Rodolphe Barrangou, Anthony Fauci, and Frank Plummer.

#1244

Bernhard Palsson

#28094

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Bernhard Ørn Palsson is the Galletti Professor of Bioengineering and an adjunct professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Education Palsson received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1984 under the supervision of Edwin N. Lightfoot.

#1245

Richard Southwood

#29944

Overall Influence

1931 - 2005 (74 years)

Sir Thomas Richard Edmund Southwood GOM DL FRS was a British biologist, professor of zoology and vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. A specialist on entomology, he developed the field of insect ecology and the development of study techniques. He wrote a landmark textbook on Ecological Methods that went into numerous editions. He also was well known for developing the field of entomology through mentorship of a circle of researchers at Silwood Park.

#1246

Wilhelm Meise

#34091

Overall Influence

1901 - 2002 (101 years)

Wilhelm Meise was a German ornithologist. He studied at the University of Berlin from 1924 to 1928, where he did his Ph.D. dissertation on the distribution of the carrion crow and the hooded crow, and hybridization between them under the supervision of Professor Erwin Stresemann, . He also analysed taxonomic and historic relationships between the house sparrow and the Spanish sparrow in particular the status of the "Italian sparrow". He was curator of vertebrates at the Museum of Natural History in Dresden from 1929 until World War II.

#1247

Annica Dahlström

#35085

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Annica Dahlström is a Swedish physician and Professor Emerita of Histology and Neuroscience at the Department of Medical Chemistry and Cell Biology at Gothenburg University. Dahlström's research focuses on how nerve cells store and transport signals, but she has also published research on many other areas of histology and neuroscience. She earned her doctorate at 25 as the youngest Swedish physician to earn a doctorate. She was Professor of Histology and Neuroscience at Gothenburg University from 1983 until her 2008 retirement.

#1248

Mark Walport

#9185

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Sir Mark Jeremy Walport is an English medical scientist and was the Government Chief Scientific Adviser in the United Kingdom from 2013 to 2017 and Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation from 2017 to 2020. In 2023 he became the Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society .

#1249

Rao Yi

#30716

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Rao Yi is a Chinese neurobiologist. A Ph.D. graduate from the University of California, San Francisco, Rao held a Helen Hay Whitney fellowship at Harvard University and was on the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University before moving back to China to take up the deanship of Peking University's School of Life Sciences in 2007 . He is currently Director and Principal Investigator of IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Peking University.

#1250

Lars Ernster

#22362

Overall Influence

1920 - 1998 (78 years)

Lars Ernster was a professor of biochemistry, and a member of the Board of the Nobel Foundation. Biography Lars Ernster was born in Hungary and came to Sweden in 1946. He played a prominent role in the scientific community. He took his PhD degree at the Stockholm University in 1956. Until 1967 he was the head of the division for Physiological Chemistry at the Wenner-Gren Institute . From 1967 to 1986 he was a professor of biochemistry. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1974. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 19...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions