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

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1251

W. Wallace Cleland

W. Wallace Cleland

#31342

Overall Influence

1930 - 2013 (83 years)

William Wallace Cleland Life and education Cleland was born in 1930 in Baltimore, Maryland. He received his A.B. from Oberlin College in 1950 and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1953 and 1955, respectively. He was an avid stamp collector and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Philately by the Smithsonian Institution in 2008. Cleland died on March 6, 2013, after falling on ice.

#1252

Stephen Elledge

#34872

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Stephen Joseph Elledge is an American geneticist. He is the current Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at the Department of Genetics of Harvard Medical School and in the Division of Genetics of the Brigham and Women's Hospital. His research is focused on the genetic and molecular mechanisms of eukaryotic response to DNA damage and is known as the discoverer of the DNA damage response .

#1253

Kartar Singh Thind

#41328

Overall Influence

1917 - 1991 (74 years)

Kartar Singh Thind was a botanist. He was born in Saidpur, Sultanpur Lodhi tehsil, Kapurthala district, Punjab, India. A scientist and educationist, Thind was M.Sc, Ph. D, F.N.A.Sc. He did his Doctorate in Plant Pathology from the University of Wisconsin, USA.

#1254

Brian Follett

#16713

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Sir Brian Keith Follett is a British biologist, academic administrator, and policy maker. His research focused upon how the environment, particularly the annual change in day-length , controls breeding in birds and mammals. Knighted in 1992, he won the Frink Medal and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1984, and served as the chair of the UK government's teacher training agency and Arts and Humanities Research Council, and was Vice-Chancellor of University of Warwick.

#1255

Ralph H. Hruban

#24493

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ralph H. Hruban is professor of pathology and oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is currently Director of the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center at Johns Hopkins, and Baxley Professor and Director of the Department of Pathology. He is a world expert on pancreatic cancer.

#1256

Akira Miyawaki

#10383

Overall Influence

1928 - 2021 (93 years)

was a Japanese botanist and an expert in plant ecology who specialized in seeds and natural forests. He was active worldwide as a specialist in natural vegetation restoration of degraded land. He was professor emeritus at Yokohama National University and director of the Japanese Center for International Studies in Ecology since 1993. He received the Blue Planet Prize in 2006.

#1257

Margaret T. Fuller

#39129

Overall Influence

Margaret "Minx" T. Fuller is an American developmental biologist known for her research on the male germ line and defining the role of the stem cell environment in specifying cell fate and differentiation.

#1258

George Paxinos

#43879

Overall Influence

#1259

Christine Orengo

Christine Orengo

#28002

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Christine Anne Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London known for her work on protein structure, particularly the CATH database. Orengo serves as president of the International Society for Computational Biology , the first woman to do so in the history of the society.

#1260

Daria Mochly-Rosen

#23946

Overall Influence

Daria Mochly-Rosen is a Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she also holds the George D. Smith Chair for Translational Medicine. She is in addition the founder of Mitoconix Bio, a startup company whose goal is to produce drugs that treat Huntington's disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses.

#1261

John Olney

#20710

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

John Olney was a medical doctor and a professor of psychiatry, pathology, and immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine. He is known for his work on brain damage. He coined the term excitotoxicity in his 1969 paper published in Science. Olney's lesions are named after him. In 1996 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He had campaigned for greater regulation of monosodium glutamate , aspartame and other excitotoxins for over twenty years. He died at his residence on April 14, 2015 at the age of 83.

#1262

Albert de la Chapelle

#23271

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Albert Fredrik de la Chapelle, MD, Ph.D was a Finnish human geneticist, long-time head of Finland's first Department of Medical Genetics at the University of Helsinki, and subsequently professor of Human Cancer Genetics at Ohio State University. He was best known for his role in the elucidation of the genetics of hereditary colorectal cancer and Lynch syndrome.

#1263

Bart De Strooper

#34815

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Bart De Strooper is a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie and KU Leuven and the UK Dementia Research Institute and University College London, UK. De Strooper's research seeks to translate genetic data into the identification and tratment of neurodegenerative diseases and treatments. interest are the secretases, proteases which cleave the amyloid precursor protein , resulting in amyloid peptides.

#1264

Norman Arnheim

#31387

Overall Influence

Norman Arnheim is an American biologist specializing in aging and development biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology. He is currently a Distinguished Professor and the Ester Dornsife Chair at the University of Southern California, and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1265

Robert Desimone

#26663

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Robert Desimone is an American neuroscientist who currently serves as the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1266

Stephen Palumbi

#29021

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Stephen R. Palumbi is the Jane and Marshall Steel Jr. Professor in Marine Sciences at Stanford University at Hopkins Marine Station. He also holds a Senior Fellowship at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

#1267

David Schindler

#27339

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

David William Schindler, , was an American/Canadian limnologist. He held the Killam Memorial Chair and was Professor of Ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. He was notable for "innovative large-scale experiments" on whole lakes at the Experimental Lakes Area which proved that "phosphorus controls the eutrophication in temperate lakes leading to the banning of phosphates in detergents. He was also known for his research on acid rain. In 1989, Schindler moved from the ELA to continue his research at the University of Alberta in ...

#1268

Lloyd j. Old

#44273

Overall Influence

#1269

John M. Opitz

#26052

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

John M. Opitz was a German-American medical geneticist and professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He is best known for rediscovering the concept of the developmental field in humans and for his detection and delineation of many genetic syndromes, several now known as the "Opitz syndromes" including Smith–Lemli–Opitz syndrome , Opitz–Kaveggia syndrome , Opitz G/BBB syndrome, Bohring–Opitz syndrome, and other autosomal and X-linked conditions. He is founder of the Wisconsin Clinical Genetics Center, the American Journal of Medical Genetics, and was a cofounder of the American ...

#1270

F. James Rohlf

#30992

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

F. James Rohlf is an American biostatistician, currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Positions The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. Research Assistant: 1958–1959. Teaching Assistant: Fall 1959. Research Associate: Summer 1962. Visiting Assistant Professor of Entomology: Spring 1965. Research Associate: Spring 1966. Associate Professor of Statistical Biology: 1966–1969.The University of California, Santa Barbara, California. Assistant Professor of Biology: 1962–1966.IBM, Yorktown Heights, New York.

#1271

Susumu Ohno

#13242

Overall Influence

1928 - 2000 (72 years)

Susumu Ohno was a Japanese-American geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and seminal researcher in the field of molecular evolution. Biography Susumu Ohno was born to Japanese parents in Keijō, Chōsen , Empire of Japan on February 1, 1928. The second of five children, he was the son of the minister of education of the Japanese Protectorate of Korea. The family returned to mainland Japan after the war in 1945. He later became a citizen of the United States. Susumu Ohno married musician Midori Aoyama in 1951. They had two sons and one daughter.

#1272

Pierce Brodkorb

Pierce Brodkorb

#32378

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

William Pierce Brodkorb was an American ornithologist and paleontologist. Interested in birds since childhood, he was taught to prepare birds at the age of 16. Later, he received the opportunity to work as a staff technician in the Ornithology Division of the Field Museum. He entered the University of Michigan in 1933 and obtained his PhD degree in 1936.

#1273

Susana López Charretón

#25098

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Susana López Charretón is a Mexican virologist specialized in understanding the mechanisms of infection of rotavirus. López Charretón has led a research program as principal investigator at the Biotechnology Institute in Cuernavaca, Mexico for over 25 years.

#1274

Marion J. Lamb

#26484

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Marion Julia Lamb was Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, before her retirement. She studied the effect of environmental conditions such as heat, radiation and pollution on metabolic activity and genetic mutability in the fruit fly Drosophila. From the late 1980s, Lamb collaborated with Eva Jablonka, researching and writing on the inheritance of epigenetic variations, and in 2005 they co-authored the book Evolution in Four Dimensions, considered by some to be in the vanguard of an ongoing revolution within evolutionary biology.

#1275

James Hopson

#31934

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

James Allen Hopson is an American paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago. His work has focused on the evolution of the synapsids , and has been focused on the transition from basal synapsids to mammals, from the late Paleozoic through the Mesozoic Eras. He received his doctorate at Chicago in 1965, and worked at Yale before returning to Chicago in 1967 as a faculty member in Anatomy, and has also been a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History since 1971. He has also worked on the paleobiology of dinosaurs, and his work, along with that of Peter Dodson,...

#1276

Richard P. Lifton

#27133

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Richard Priestley Lifton is an American biochemist and the 11th and current president of The Rockefeller University. He earned his B.A. in biological sciences from Dartmouth College and in 1986 he got his M.D. and Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University. He trained at Brigham and Women's Hospital before starting his lab at Yale in 1993. He has been awarded the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences for his discovery of genes that are associated with the regulation of blood pressure. In 2014 he was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his work. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1994.

#1277

Peter Lachmann

#25451

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Sir Peter Julius Lachmann was a British immunologist, specialising in the study of the complement system. He was emeritus Sheila Joan Smith Professor of Immunology at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge and honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and of Imperial College. He was knighted for service to medical science in 2002.

#1278

Martin Kreitman

#21724

Overall Influence

Martin Edward Kreitman is an American geneticist at the University of Chicago, most well known for the McDonald–Kreitman test that is used to infer the amount of adaptive evolution in population genetic studies.

#1279

Mark A. Smith

#23715

Overall Influence

1965 - 2010 (45 years)

Mark Anthony Smith was a professor of pathology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also served as the Director of Basic Science Research at the University Memory and Aging Center. At the time of his death, he had been serving as Executive Director of the American Aging Association.

#1280

Zanvil A. Cohn

#38345

Overall Influence

1926 - 1993 (67 years)

Zanvil Alexander Cohn was a cell biologist and immunologist who upon his death was described by The New York Times as being "in the forefront of current studies of the body's defenses against infection.", professor at Rockefeller University. There Cohn had been the Henry G. Kunkel Professor for seven years. Cohn was senior physician at the university as well as vice president for medical affairs. Until two years before his death, he also served as principal investigator of the Irvington Institute for Medical Research. Although Cohn never won the Nobel Prize, Ralph M. Steinman, with whom he r...

#1281

Rudolf Amann

#38785

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Rudolf Amann is a German biochemistriest and microbiologist. He is director of Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and Professor for Microbial Ecology at the University of Bremen.

#1282

Richard Anthony Jefferson

Richard Anthony Jefferson

#29610

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Richard Anthony Jefferson is an American-born molecular biologist and social entrepreneur who developed the widely used reporter gene system GUS, conducted the world's first biotech crop release, proposed the Hologenome theory of evolution, pioneered Biological Open Source and founded The Lens. He is founder of the social enterprise Cambia and a professor of Biological Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology. In 2003 he was named by Scientific American as one of the world's 50 most influential technologists, and is renowned for his work on making science-enabled innovation more widely accessible.

#1283

W. Tecumseh Fitch

#7348

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III is an American evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna where he is co-founder of the Department of Cognitive Biology. Fitch studies the biology and evolution of cognition and communication in humans and other animals, and in particular the evolution of speech, language and music. His work concentrates on comparative approaches as advocated by Charles Darwin .

#1284

Frank J. Gonzalez

#44858

Overall Influence

#1285

Philip Hanawalt

#25169

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Philip C. Hanawalt is an American biologist who discovered the process of repair replication of damaged DNA in 1963. He is also considered the co-discoverer of the ubiquitous process of DNA excision repair along with his mentor, Richard Setlow, and Paul Howard-Flanders. He holds the Dr. Morris Herzstein Professorship in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, with a joint appointment in the Dermatology Department in Stanford University School of Medicine.

#1286

Sean J. Morrison

Sean J. Morrison

#19660

Overall Influence

Sean J. Morrison is a Canadian-American stem cell biologist and cancer researcher. Morrison is the director of Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern, a nonprofit research institute established in 2011 as a joint venture between Children’s Health System of Texas and UT Southwestern Medical Center. The CRI was established in 2011 by Morrison with the mission to perform transformative biomedical research at the interface of stem cell biology, cancer, and metabolism to better understand the biological basis of disease. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and member of the National Academy of Medicine.

#1287

Owen Witte

#29914

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Owen Witte is an American physician-scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a distinguished professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, founding director of the UCLA Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, and the UC Regents’ David Saxon Presidential Chair in developmental immunology . Witte is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the President's Cancer Panel . He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2013.

#1288

David Ho

#13954

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

David Da-i Ho is a Taiwanese American AIDS researcher, physician, and virologist who has made a number of scientific contributions to the understanding and treatment of HIV infection. He championed for combination anti-retroviral therapy instead of single therapy, which turned HIV from absolute terminal disease into a chronic disease.

#1289

Ruth E. Ley

#43850

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Ruth E. Ley is a British-American microbial ecologist. Ley was an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University until 2018. She is currently serving as the director of the Microbiome Science Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biology.

#1290

Ewald Weibel

#41081

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Ewald Rudolf Weibel HonFRMS was a Swiss anatomist and physiologist and former director of the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Bern. He was one of the first scientists to describe the endothelial organelles Weibel–Palade bodies, which are named after him and his Romanian-American colleague George Emil Palade. He was known for his work on the anatomy of gas exchange in lungs on multiple spatial scales using stereology.

#1291

John T. Lis

#26377

Overall Influence

John T. Lis is the Barbara McClintock Professor of Molecular Biology & Genetics at the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Dr. Lis was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 for his research on protein templating in the propagation of gene activity.Harvey Lecture, 2018

#1292

Nancy Haigwood

#23842

Overall Influence

Nancy Logan Haigwood is an American scientist. She is a professor and the director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center. Haigwood is an HIV/AIDS researcher and serves as a volunteer board member on the Cascade AIDS Project. She is an advocate of science education and outreach.

#1293

Claudia Neuhauser

#31661

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Claudia Maria Neuhauser is a mathematician whose research focuses on mathematical biology and spatial ecology. She also investigates computational biology and bioinformatics. Neuhauser is currently Interim Vice Chancellor/Vice President for Research at the University of Houston, where she has been employed since 2018.

#1294

Ting Wu

#28289

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Chao-ting Wu is an American molecular biologist. After training at Harvard Medical School in genetics with William Gelbart, at Stanford Medical School with David Hogness, and in a fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in molecular biology, Wu began her independent academic career as an assistant professor in Anatomy and Cellular Biology and then Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1993. After a period as Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Molecular Medicine at the Boston Children's Hospital, she returned to the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School as a full profes...

#1295

Thomas J. Kelly

#34299

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Thomas J. Kelly is an American cancer researcher whose work focuses on the molecular mechanisms of DNA replication. Kelly is director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, the basic research arm of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He holds the Center's Benno C. Schmidt Chair of Cancer Research.

#1296

Peter Vitousek

#35508

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Peter Morrison Vitousek is an American ecologist, particularly known for his work on the nitrogen cycle. Born in Hawaii, Vitousek graduated from Amherst College in 1971 and received his Ph.D. in biology from Dartmouth College in 1975. Since then, he has worked as an Assistant Professor of Zoology and Biology at Indiana University , an Associate Professor of Botany and Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , and a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University since 1984. He is married to fellow Stanford professor and ecologist Pamela Matson.

#1297

Pascale Cossart

Pascale Cossart

#31946

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Pascale Cossart is a French bacteriologist who is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute of Paris. She is the foremost authority on Listeria monocytogenes, a deadly and common food-borne pathogen responsible for encephalitis, meningitis, bacteremia, gastroenteritis, and other diseases.

#1298

Robert F. Inger

Robert F. Inger

#21022

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Robert Frederick Inger was an American herpetologist. During his lifetime, he wrote numerous books and publications about herpetology. He was also the curator for amphibians and reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

#1299

Robert E. W. Hancock

Robert E. W. Hancock

#42933

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Robert Ernest William Hancock is a Canadian microbiologist and University of British Columbia Killam Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, an Associate Faculty Member of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and a Canada Research Chair in Health and Genomics.

#1300

Marshall F. Folstein

#45183

Overall Influence

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