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).
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#1301
Wayne Nicholson
#40496
Overall Influence
Wayne Nicholson was an American biologist. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1987 and served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Connecticut from 1987-1990. He taught in the department of microbiology and cell biology at the University of Florida, and also held the title of Distinguished Professor.
Go to Profile#1302
Rolf Singer
#16980
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Rolf Singer was a German-born mycologist and one of the most important taxonomists of gilled mushrooms in the 20th century. He wrote major books like "The Agaricales in Modern Taxonomy". He fled to various countries during the Nazi period, pursuing mycology in far-flung places like the Soviet Union, Argentina, and finally the United States, as mycologist at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Go to Profile#1303
John Rothwell
#40836
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John C. Rothwell is a Professor of neurophysiology at the UCL Institute of Neurology. His main area of interest is transcranial magnetic stimulation and motor control. Education Rothwell was educated at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD at King's College London in 1980 which supervised by David Marsden.
Go to Profile#1304
Benno Müller-Hill
#30836
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Benno Müller-Hill was a German biologist and author. Together with Walter Gilbert, Müller-Hill purified the lac repressor, the first genetic control protein to be isolated. Müller-Hill has lectured widely and written books on the misuse of science by the Nazis.
Go to Profile#1305
Werner E. Reichardt
#16600
Overall Influence
1924 - 1992 (68 years)
Werner E. Reichardt was a German physicist and biologist who helped to establish the field of biological cybernetics. He co-founded the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, and the Journal of Biological Cybernetics.
Go to Profile#1306
Azad Bonni
#28108
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Azad Bonni is a Canadian and American neuroscientist of Kurdish origin. The focus of his research is to understand the mechanisms of neuronal connectivity in the brain. From October 2012 until June 30, 2019, he was the Edison Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine. As of July 1, 2019, he is SVP and head of neuroscience and rare diseases research and early development at Roche in Basel, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#1307
Don Craig Wiley
#21328
Overall Influence
1944 - 2001 (57 years)
Don Craig Wiley was an American structural biologist. Education Wiley received his doctoral degree in biophysics in 1971 from Harvard University, where he worked under the direction of the subsequent 1976 chemistry Nobel Prize winner William N. Lipscomb, Jr. There, Wiley did early work on the structure of aspartate carbamoyltransferase, the largest molecular structure determined at that time. Noteworthy in this effort was that Wiley managed to grow crystals of aspartate carbamoyltransferase suitable for obtaining its X-ray structure, a particularly difficult task in the case of this molecular...
Go to Profile#1308
Barbara J. Meyer
#39877
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Barbara J. Meyer is a biologist and genetist, noted for her pioneering research on lambda phage, a virus that infects bacteria; discovery of the master control gene involved in sex determination; and studies of gene regulation, particularly dosage compensation. Meyer's work has revealed mechanisms of sex determination and dosage compensation—that balance X-chromosome gene expression between the sexes in Caenorhabditis elegans that continue to serve as the foundation of diverse areas of study on chromosome structure and function today.
Go to Profile#1309
Matthew P. Scott
#29935
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Matthew P. Scott is an American biologist who was the tenth president of the Carnegie Institution for Science. While at Stanford University, Scott studied how embryonic and later development is governed by proteins that control gene activity and cell signaling processes. He co- discovered homeobox genes in Drosophila melanogaster working with Amy J. Weiner at Indiana University.
Go to Profile#1310
Andrew H. Knoll
#30520
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Andrew Herbert Knoll is the Fisher Research Professor of Natural History and a Research Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Andrew Knoll graduated from Lehigh University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1973 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977 for a dissertation titled "Studies in Archean and Early Proterozoic Paleontology." Knoll taught at Oberlin College for five years before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1982. At Harvard, he serves in the departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and...
Go to Profile#1311
Christine Van Broeckhoven
#19145
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Christine Van Broeckhoven is a Belgian molecular biologist and professor in Molecular genetics at the University of Antwerp . She is also leading the VIB Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Antwerp of the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology . Christine Van Broeckhoven does research on Alzheimer dementia, bipolar mental disorders and other neurological diseases. Since 1983 she has had her own laboratory for molecular genetics at the University of Antwerp, and since 2005 is focussing her research on neurodegenerative brain diseases. She is an associate editor of the scientific jour...
Go to Profile#1312
Harold Amos
#19485
Overall Influence
1918 - 2003 (85 years)
Harold Amos was an American microbiologist. He taught at Harvard Medical School for nearly fifty years and was the first African-American department chair of the school. Early life Amos was born in Pennsauken, New Jersey to Howard R. Amos Sr., a Philadelphia postman, and Iola Johnson. Iola Johnson was adopted and educated by a Philadelphia Quaker family. Due to the close relationship between Iola and the Quaker family, the Amos family received a lot of books, including a biography of Louis Pasteur. Excelling as a student, Amos graduated in 1936 at the top of his class from Camden High School in New Jersey.
Go to Profile#1313
Nina Papavasiliou
#25870
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nina Papavasiliou is an immunologist and Helmholtz Professor in the Division of Immune Diversity at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. She is also an adjunct professor at the Rockefeller University, where she was previously associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Biology. She is best known for her work in the fields of DNA and RNA editing.
Go to Profile#1314
Albert Levan
#21545
Overall Influence
1905 - 1998 (93 years)
Albert Levan was a Swedish botanist and geneticist. Albert Levan is best known today for co-authoring the report in 1956 that humans had forty-six chromosomes . This epochal discovery was made by Joe Hin Tjio in Levan's laboratory.
Go to Profile#1315
Marianne Bronner
#38598
Overall Influence
Marianne Bronner is a developmental biologist who currently serves as Edward B. Lewis Professor of Biology and an executive officer for Neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology. Her most notable work includes her research on the neural crest. Bronner's research focuses on studying the cellular events behind the migration, differentiation, and formation of neural crest cells. She currently directs her own laboratory at the California Institute of Technology called the Bronner Laboratory, and she has authored over 400 articles in her field.
Go to Profile#1316
Richard Wolfenden
#25931
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Richard Vance Wolfenden NAS AAA&S is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of chemistry, biochemistry and biophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. His research involves the kinetics of enzymatic reactions, and his laboratory has made significant contributions to the understanding of catalytic rate enhancements.
Go to Profile#1317
Christian Drosten
#22232
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Christian Heinrich Maria Drosten is a German virologist whose research focus is on novel viruses . During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten came to national prominence as an expert on the implications and actions required to combat the illness in Germany.
Go to Profile#1318
Wen-Hsiung Li
#24666
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Wen-Hsiung Li is a Taiwanese-American scientist working in the fields of molecular evolution, population genetics, and genomics. He is currently the James Watson Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Information Science and Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
Go to Profile#1319
Jeffery Dangl
#32106
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jeffery Lee Dangl is an American biologist. He is currently John N. Couch Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Education Dangl earned his BAS of Biological Sciences and Modern Literature, MS of Biological Sciences, and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He completed a postdoc at the Department of Biochemistry, Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung in Köln, Germany.
Go to Profile#1320
David Pimentel
#20607
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
David Pimentel was a professor of Insect Ecology & Agricultural Sciences in the Department of Entomology and Section of Ecology and Systematics at Cornell University. He made contributions in ecology, entomology, agriculture, biotechnology, conservation, and environmental policy. He was recognized as an international authority on many important interactions between humans and the environment. He published over 700 scientific items, of which 37 are books, and served on many national and government committees, including the National Academy of Sciences, the President's Science Advisory Council, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S.
Go to Profile#1321
Stuart Pimm
#21953
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Stuart Leonard Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University. His early career was as a theoretical ecologist but he now specialises in scientific research of biodiversity and conservation biology.
Go to Profile#1322
Cesare Emiliani
#11141
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Cesare Emiliani was an Italian-American scientist, geologist, micropaleontologist, and founder of paleoceanography, developing the timescale of marine isotope stages, which despite modifications remains in use today.
Go to Profile#1323
Yoshio Masui
#31799
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Yoshio Masui is a Japanese Canadian cell biologist. Masui retired in 1997 and has since held the position of Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Education Masui studied biology at Kyoto University, graduating with his Bachelor of Science degree in zoology in 1953, his Master of Science in 1955 and his Ph.D. in 1961.
Go to Profile#1324
E. C. Pielou
#36779
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Evelyn Chrystalla "E.C." Pielou was a Canadian statistical ecologist. Biography Pielou studied at the University of London, where she obtained her bachelor's degree in botany in 1951 and her PhD in 1962. From 1963 to 1964, she worked as a researcher for the Canadian Department of Forestry, followed by the Canadian Department of Agriculture between 1964 and 1967. Later she was professor of biology at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario and at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and then Oil Sands Environmental Research Professor working out of the University of Lethbridge, Alberta...
Go to Profile#1325
John E. Casida
#39142
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
John Edward Casida was an American entomologist, toxicologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Birth and education Casida was born in 1929 in the United States. He completed his BS from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1951. He completed his MS in 1951 and PhD in 1954 from the same university.
Go to Profile#1326
Max Birnstiel
#37047
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Max Luciano Birnstiel was a Swiss molecular biologist who held a number of positions in scientific leadership in Europe, including the chair of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich from 1972–86, and that of founding director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna from 1986 to 1996. His research focused on gene regulation in eukaryotes. His research group is sometimes cited as the first to purify single genes, the ribosomal RNA genes from Xenopus laevis, three years before the successful isolation of the lac operon. He is also recognized for one of the earliest discoveries of a gene enhancer element.
Go to Profile#1327
Stefanie Dimmeler
#24298
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Stefanie Dimmeler is a German biologist specializing in the pathophysiological processes underlying cardiovascular diseases. Her awards and honours include the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation for her work on the programmed cell death of endothelial cells. Since 2008 she has led the Institute for Cardiovascular Regeneration at the University of Frankfurt. Her current work is focusing to develop cellular and pharmacological strategies to improve cardiovascular repair and regeneration. Her work aims to establish non-coding RNAs as novel therapeutic targets.
Go to Profile#1328
Donald W. Pfaff
#44676
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Donald Wells Pfaff is a professor and head of the Laboratory of Neuroscience and Behavior at The Rockefeller University in New York City. Early life Donald Pfaff was born in on December 9, 1939. He graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude , and received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . After further training at MIT and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, he joined The Rockefeller University in 1966 as a post-doctoral fellow. He was appointed assistant professor in 1969, promoted to associate professor in 1971, and gained tenure in 1973. He has been pr...
Go to Profile#1329
John L. Fuller
#29061
Overall Influence
1910 - 1992 (82 years)
John Langworthy Fuller was an American biologist and early pioneer of behavior genetics. Fuller was a researcher at the Jackson Laboratory from 1947 to 1970 and professor of psychology at the Binghamton University from 1970 until retiring in 1977.
Go to Profile#1330
Nikolaus Rajewsky
#27869
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Nikolaus Rajewsky is a German system biologist at the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine and at the Charité in Berlin. He founded and directs the “Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology” . He leads the Rajewsky lab, where he studies how RNA regulates gene expression. He also co-chairs LifeTime, a pan-European research initiative of more than 90 academic institutions and 70 companies, which aims to revolutionize healthcare by mapping, understanding, and targeting cells during disease progression. LifeTime integrates several technologies: single-cell multiomics, machine learning, and personalized disease models such as organoids.
Go to Profile#1331
Stephen R. Carpenter
#35201
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Stephen Russell Carpenter is an American lake ecologist who focuses on lake eutrophication which is the over-enrichment of lake ecosystems leading to toxic blooms of micro-organisms and fish kills. Early life Born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, his father, Richard, a chemist, became the Director of the National Academies’ Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, so Carpenter was immersed in science at a young age. In his youth, Carpenter spent his summers on his grandfather's farm in Missouri. During this time he and his relatives enjoyed fishing, hunting and camping. “Hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting all come together in ecology,” he says.
Go to Profile#1332
Daniel Hartl
#40276
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Daniel L. Hartl is the Higgins Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is also a principal investigator at the Hartl Laboratory at Harvard University. His research interests are focused on evolutionary genomics, molecular evolution, and population genetics.
Go to Profile#1333
Christoff Koch
#45910
Overall Influence
#1334
Joe Neilands
#25969
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
John Brian "Joe" Neilands was a Canadian-born American biochemist and professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1951 until his retirement in 1993. Early life and education Neilands was born on September 11, 1921, in Glen Valley, British Columbia, to Thomas Abraham Neilands and Mary Rebecca Neilands , both of whom immigrated from Northern Ireland. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Guelph in 1944, his master's degree from Dalhousie University in 1946, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in biochemistry in 1949.
Go to Profile#1335
Edward C. Holmes
#31233
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Edward Charles Holmes is a British evolutionary biologist and virologist. Since 2012, he has been a fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia and professor at the University of Sydney. He was an honorary visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, from 2019-2021.
Go to Profile#1336
Sallie W. Chisholm
#29879
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sallie Watson "Penny" Chisholm is an American biological oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an expert in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes. Her research focuses particularly on the most abundant marine phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus, that she discovered in the 1980s with Rob Olson and other collaborators. She has a TED talk about their discovery and importance called "The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet".
Go to Profile#1337
Arturo Falaschi
#30746
Overall Influence
1933 - 2010 (77 years)
Arturo Falaschi was an Italian geneticist. Biography He graduated in Medicine in 1957 from University of Milan and undertook two post doctoral studies. Firstly, with J. Adler and Har Gobind Khorana in Wisconsin, USA , and later with Arthur Kornberg at Stanford . His main field of research was the replication of DNA. He was Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Pavia ; Director of the Instituto di Genetica Biochimica ed Evoluzionistica, CNR, Pavia ; and Director of the Progetto Finalizzato "Ingegneria Genetica" of the Italian National Research Council . He taught Molecular Biolo...
Go to Profile#1338
John Skehel
#31879
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sir John James Skehel, is a British virologist and Emeritus scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. From 1987 to 2006 he was director of the National Institute of Medical Research at Mill Hill which was incorporated into the Crick Institute in 2016.
Go to Profile#1339
Rebecca Heald
#45832
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Rebecca W. Heald is an American professor of cell and developmental biology. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In May 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She has published over 120 research articles in peer reviewed journals.
Go to Profile#1340
Stanisław Tołpa
#22881
Overall Influence
1901 - 1996 (95 years)
Stanislaw Tołpa was a Polish professor of botany. He has developed a method of peat preparation called by his name. Tołpa, born into a poor peasant family in eastern Poland, graduated theologian, then studied mathematics and natural sciences at Lwów University where he completed a doctorate on peatlands in Chornohora. He worked as a biology teacher in a high school in Kalisz until 1939.
Go to Profile#1341
Steve Horvath
#16426
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Steve Horvath is a German–American aging researcher, geneticist, and biostatistician. He is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles known for developing the Horvath aging clock, which is a highly accurate molecular biomarker of aging, and for developing weighted correlation network analysis. His work on the genomic biomarkers of aging, the aging process, and many age related diseases/conditions has earned him several research awards. Horvath is a principal investigator at the anti-aging startup Altos Labs and co-founder of nonprofit Clock Foundation.
Go to Profile#1342
Joseph S. Fruton
#25307
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Joseph Stewart Fruton , born Joseph Fruchtgarten, was a Polish-American biochemist and historian of science. His most significant scientific work involved synthetic peptides and their interactions with proteases; with his wife Sofia Simmonds he also published an influential textbook, General Biochemistry . From 1970 until his death, Fruton worked extensively on the history of science, particularly the history of biochemistry and molecular biology.
Go to Profile#1343
Martha Farah
#20856
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Martha Julia Farah is a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked on an unusually wide range of topics; the citation for her lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science states that “Her studies on the topics of mental imagery, face recognition, semantic memory, reading, attention, and executive functioning have become classics in the field.”
Go to Profile#1344
Joseph Richard Pawlik
#26080
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Joseph Richard Pawlik is a marine biologist. He is the Frank Hawkins Kenan Distinguished Professor of Marine Biology in the Department of Biology and Marine Biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is best known for studies of sponges on Caribbean coral reefs that reveal ecological principles such as resource trade-offs, trophic cascades and indirect effects.
Go to Profile#1345
Friedrich Ehrendorfer
#44579
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Friedrich Ehrendorfer is a professor emeritus of plant systematics at the Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research, University of Vienna. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For several years, he co-authored one of the leading university text-books in botany .
Go to Profile#1346
Manolis Kellis
#19690
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Manolis Kellis is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the area of Computational Biology and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is the head of the Computational Biology Group at MIT and is a Principal Investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.
Go to Profile#1347
Pardis Sabeti
#11354
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Pardis Christine Sabeti is an Iranian American computational biologist, medical geneticist, and evolutionary geneticist. She developed a bioinformatic statistical method which identifies sections of the genome that have been subject to natural selection and an algorithm which explains the effects of genetics on the evolution of disease.
Go to Profile#1348
Brenda Andrews
#30521
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Brenda Jean Andrews is a Canadian academic, researcher and biologist specializing in systems biology and molecular genetics. Andrews is known for her studies on cell cycle-regulated transcription and protein kinase function in yeast and for pioneering work with Charles Boone on genetic networks. As an example, in 2015, Andrews co-led a team of biology scientists at the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre to create the first ever fully detailed protein map of a cell, the map showed the location of all protein in a cell, the project aimed to benefit and help increase research for cancer cells.
Go to Profile#1349
Hubert Markl
#18953
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Hubert Simon Markl was a German biologist who also served as president of the Max Planck Society from 1996 to 2002. Early life Markl was born on 17 August 1938 in Regensburg, Germany. He studied biology, chemistry and geography at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He completed his Ph.D. in zoology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1962. He did research internships at Harvard University and Rockefeller University in 1965–1966. In 1976, he earned his Habilitation in zoology from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
Go to Profile#1350
Vittorio Gallese
#9871
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Vittorio Gallese is professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and was professor in Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London, UK . He is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Gallese is one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, including action understanding, empathy, language, mindreading and aesthetic experience.
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