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,
#1351
John Donoghue
#10858
Overall Influence
John Philip Donoghue is an American neuroscientist; he is currently the Henry Merritt Wriston Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Engineering at Brown University, where he has taught since 1984.
Go to Profile#1352
Marie Tharp
#7021
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Marie Tharp was an American geologist and oceanographic cartographer. In the 1950s, she collaborated with geologist Bruce Heezen to produce the first scientific map of the Atlantic Ocean floor. Her cartography revealed a more detailed topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape of the ocean bottom.
Go to Profile#1353
Suzanne Corkin
#11535
Overall Influence
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
Suzanne Corkin was an American professor of neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She was a leading scholar in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. She is best known for her research on human memory, which she studied in patients with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and amnesia. She is also well known for studying H.M., a man with memory loss whom she met in 1962 and studied until his death in 2008.
Go to Profile#1354
Peter Marler
#34024
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Peter Robert Marler ForMemRS was a British-born American ethologist and zoosemiotician known for his research on animal sign communication and the science of bird song. A 1964 Guggenheim Fellow, he was emeritus professor of neurobiology, physiology and ethology at the University of California, Davis.
Go to Profile#1355
Fikret Berkes
#26628
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Fikret Berkes is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba's Natural Resources Institute. Berkes studies community-based natural resources management in societies around the world.
Go to Profile#1356
Michel A. J. Georges
#29086
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Michel A. J. Georges is a Belgian biologist and a professor at the University of Liège. Birth and education Michel A. J. Georges was born in 1959 in Schoten, Belgium. He received his Doctor in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Liège in 1983, and his M.Sc. in Molecular Biology from the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1985.
Go to Profile#1357
Miguel Rolando Covian
#27485
Overall Influence
1913 - 1992 (79 years)
Miguel Rolando Covian , was an Argentine-Brazilian physiologist, medical educator and writer. Biography Early life and education Covian was born in Rufino, Santa Fe Province, Argentina, on September 7, 1913. He studied at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires, where, while a student, he worked also as a teaching assistant in the Chair of Physiology. He graduated in 1942 and soon thereafter started a full-time career in research on Physiology, initially in collaboration with Bernardo Houssay, the great Argentine physiologist, who later was awarded with the 1947 Nobel Prize ...
Go to Profile#1358
Carl-Henrik Heldin
#41872
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Carl-Henrik Heldin is Chairman of the Board for the Nobel Foundation, and a molecular biologist and medical researcher. He has been director of the Uppsala branch of Ludwig Cancer Research since 1986 and professor in molecular cell biology at the medical faculty of Uppsala University since 1992. He is vice-president of the European Research Council since 2011 and was appointed chairman of the Nobel Foundation in 2013.
Go to Profile#1359
Erwin Friedrich Wagner
#34681
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Erwin Friedrich Wagner is an Austrian biochemist known for his research on the molecular basis of cancer and associated conditions such as inflammation and cachexia. He was deputy director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center in Madrid, Spain, until 2019. Since 2019, Wagner is a group leader affiliated with the Medical University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#1360
Corrie Moreau
#22796
Overall Influence
Corrie S. Moreau is an evolutionary biologist and entomologist with a specialty in myrmecology, the study of ants. She is currently a professor and curator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Moreau studies the evolution, ecology, biogeography, systematics, and diversification of insects and their microbial gut-symbionts using molecular and genomic tools. She has also been an advocate for increasing women and diversity in the sciences.
Go to Profile#1361
Daniel S. Rokhsar
#37897
Overall Influence
Daniel S. Rokhsar is a professor in the departments of Physics and of Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley and Head of the Plant Genomics Program at the Joint Genome Institute of the United States Department of Energy. His research is focused on understanding the origin, evolution, and diversity of animals by combining computational genome analysis with comparative developmental biology. Rokhsar received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University with doctoral advisors N. David Mermin and James Sethna, and joined the Berkeley faculty in 1989.
Go to Profile#1362
Steven Vogel
#25376
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Steven Vogel was an American biomechanics researcher, the James B. Duke professor in the Department of Biology at Duke University. Life Vogel was born in Beacon, New York, and educated there and in Poughkeepsie. He graduated from Tufts University and was awarded his graduate degrees from Harvard University. Vogel joined Duke University as an assistant professor in the Zoology department in 1966, and taught there for 40 years, eventually retiring as professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#1363
Rudolf K. Thauer
#30092
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Rudolf K. Thauer is a biologist and a retired professor of microbiology and heads the Emeritus group at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg. Thauer taught in the faculty of Biology at the University of Marburg for about 15 years and is known primarily for his work on the biochemistry of methanogens.
Go to Profile#1364
Bruce Greyson
#7157
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Charles Bruce Greyson is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. He is author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond , co-author of Irreducible Mind and co-editor of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences . Greyson has written many journal articles and has given media interviews on the subject of near death experiences.
Go to Profile#1365
Philippe Janvier
#31819
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Philippe Janvier is a French paleontologist, specialising in Palaeozoic vertebrates, who currently works at the Museum National de l’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He has written several books and scientific papers on Palaeozoic vertebrates and contributed to the Tree of Life phylogeny project. He has led the largest paleontology research group in France , located in Paris. Janvier received the award of the Grand prix scientifique de la Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca on June 11, 2008, for his work. He was a founding member of the Société Française de Systématique. He is currently Associate E...
Go to Profile#1366
Larry R. Squire
#46624
Overall Influence
#1367
Otto F. Kernberg
#6368
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Otto Friedmann Kernberg is an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives . His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a school within modern psychoanalysis.
Go to Profile#1368
Ljubisav Rakić
#23750
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Ljubisav Rakić was a Serbian neurobiologist, professor and academic. Life and career Rakić was born in Sarajevo on 11 April 1931, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His parents were teachers. He graduated from the Belgrade Medical School in 1956. After graduating, he became an Assistant Professor for physiology and biochemistry at the University of Belgrade's School of Medicine. In 1969, he was already a Full Professor. Since 1971, he was a Professor for postgraduate studies in neurobiology at University of Belgrade. Rakić was the founder of the International brain research laboratory in Kotor where ...
Go to Profile#1369
Jonathan Losos
#42361
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jonathan B. Losos is an American evolutionary biologist and Herpetologist. Life Losos studied biology at Harvard University, from which he received a Bachelor's degree in 1984. Later on, in 1989, he received a PhD in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley . Starting in 1987, he worked as a Teaching assistant in Berkeley. After receiving his PhD, he moved to the University of California, Davis in 1990 to become one of the inaugural postdoctoral fellows at the Center for Population Biology. Losos then, from 1992 on, was assistant professor at the Washington University in St. Louis...
Go to Profile#1370
Arthur M. Lesk
#13130
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Arthur Mallay Lesk, is a protein science researcher, who is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Education Lesk received a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1961. He received his doctoral degree from Princeton University in 1966. He also received a master's degree from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1999.
Go to Profile#1371
Leonard P. Guarente
#36428
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Leonard Pershing Guarente is an American biologist best known for his research on life span extension in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, roundworms , and mice. He is a Novartis Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1372
Bernard Davis
#24256
Overall Influence
1916 - 1994 (78 years)
Bernard David Davis was an American biologist who made major contributions in microbial physiology and metabolism. Davis was a prominent figure at Harvard Medical School in microbiology and in national science policy. He was the 1989 recipient of the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1373
Jeffrey Lieberman
#11376
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jeffrey Alan Lieberman is an American psychiatrist who specializes in schizophrenia and related psychoses and their associated neuroscience and pharmacological treatment . He was principal investigator for CATIE, the largest and longest independent study ever funded by the United States National Institute of Mental Health to examine existing pharmacotherapies for schizophrenia. He was president of the American Psychiatric Association from May 2013 to May 2014.
Go to Profile#1374
E. Premkumar Reddy
#18858
Overall Influence
E. Premkumar Reddy is a molecular biologist specialising in molecular oncology. He is the Director of Experimental Cancer Therapeutics program and Professor in the Departments of Oncological Sciences and Structural and Chemical Biology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#1375
Simon Wessely
#10785
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sir Simon Charles Wessely is a British psychiatrist. He is Regius Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London and head of its department of psychological medicine, vice dean for academic psychiatry, teaching and training at the Institute of Psychiatry, as well as Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research. He is also honorary consultant psychiatrist at King's College Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital, as well as civilian consultant advisor in psychiatry to the British Army. He was knighted in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to military healthcare and to psychological medicine.
Go to Profile#1376
Hans Eiberg
#29852
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Hans Eiberg, is a Danish geneticist, known for his discovery of the genetic mutation causing blue eyes. Hans Eiberg graduated as a M.Sc. in 1970. He has worked with genetics at the Institute for Medical Biochemistry and Genetics of Copenhagen University since 1971, and became an associate professor at the institute in 1975.
Go to Profile#1377
Vsevolod Tkachuk
#18921
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Vsevolod Tkachuk Soviet and Russian biochemist. Academician of RAMS and RAS . Dean of the Faculty of fundamental medicine of Lomonosov Moscow State University . Director of institute of regenerative medicine in Lomonosov Moscow State University and president of National regenerative medicine society .
Go to Profile#1378
Thereza Imanishi-Kari
#23792
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Thereza Imanishi-Kari is an associate professor of pathology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on the origins of autoimmune diseases, particularly systemic lupus erythematosus, studied using mice as model organisms. Previously she had been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her role in what became known as the "Baltimore affair", in which a 1986 paper she co-authored with David Baltimore was the subject of research misconduct allegations. Following a series of investigations, she was fully exonerated of the charges in 1996.
Go to Profile#1379
Peter Newman
#14874
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Peter William Geoffrey Newman is an environmental scientist, author and educator based in Perth, Western Australia. He is currently Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University. He is best known for his contributions to the development of Perth's electrified metropolitan rail network through both activist and official consulting roles since the 1980s.
Go to Profile#1380
Darwin Prockop
#43141
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Darwin Prockop is an American biochemist and progenitor cell researcher. He has held academic posts at several universities, and has been a faculty member at the Texas A&M Health Science Center since 2008. Prockop has been elected to several academic societies, including the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
Go to Profile#1381
Eleanor Maguire
#12300
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Eleanor Anne Maguire is an Irish neuroscientist. Since 2007, she has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.
Go to Profile#1382
Marina Rodnina
#27538
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Marina V. Rodnina is a German biochemist. Life Born in Kyiv, Rodnina studied biology at the University of Kyiv and obtained her PhD in molecular biology and genetics in 1989. From 1990 to 1992, she was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Witten/Herdecke University. Afterwards, she was a research assistant at the same university and she received her habilitation in 1997. From 1998 to 2008, she was a professor at the Witten/Herdecke University. Since 2008, she is a scientific member and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.
Go to Profile#1383
Georgina Mace
#33476
Overall Influence
1953 - 2020 (67 years)
Dame Georgina Mary Mace, was a British ecologist and conservation scientist. She was Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University College London, and previously Professor of Conservation Science and Director of the Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College London and Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London .
Go to Profile#1384
Jack Sepkoski
#23206
Overall Influence
1948 - 1999 (51 years)
Joseph John Sepkoski Jr. was a University of Chicago paleontologist. Sepkoski studied the fossil record and the diversity of life on Earth. Sepkoski and David Raup produced a new understanding of extinction events, by developing a statistical approach to the study of taxonomic diversification. They suggested that the extinction of dinosaurs 66 mya was part of a cycle of mass extinctions that may have occurred every 26 million years. But their most important contribution was the identification of the "Big 5" mass extinctions, events that have shaped the evolution of life on earth.
Go to Profile#1385
Andrew Lees
#37196
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Andrew John Lees FRCP FRCP FMedSci is Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London and University College London. In 2011 he was named as the world's most highly cited Parkinson's disease researcher.
Go to Profile#1386
Nir Friedman
#15863
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Nir Friedman is an Israeli Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research combines Machine Learning and Statistical Learning with Systems Biology, specifically in the fields of Gene Regulation, Transcription and Chromatin.
Go to Profile#1387
Paul Colinvaux
#39808
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Paul Colinvaux was an ecologist and professor emeritus at Ohio State University. Colinvaux was born in London, England. He attended University College School in London, where his activities included rowing in the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta. After graduating from UCS, Colinvaux earned a commission in the Royal Artillery. He was stationed in Germany as part of the British occupation after World War II. Colinvaux achieved the rank of second lieutenant.
Go to Profile#1388
Norman I. Platnick
#28948
Overall Influence
1951 - 2020 (69 years)
Norman Ira Platnick was an American biological systematist and arachnologist. At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus of the Richard Gilder Graduate School and Peter J. Solomon Family Curator Emeritus of the invertebrate zoology department of the American Museum of Natural History. A 1973 Ph.D. recipient at Harvard University, Platnick described over 1,800 species of spiders from around the world, making him the second most prolific spider taxonomist in history, behind only Eugène Simon. Until 2014 he was also the maintainer of the World Spider Catalog, a website formerly host...
Go to Profile#1389
Yuet Wai Kan
#13487
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Yuet Wai Kan , is a Chinese-American geneticist and hematologist. He is the current Louis K. Diamond Chair in Hematology and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a former president of the American Society of Hematology.
Go to Profile#1390
Wacław Szybalski
#24563
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Wacław Szybalski was a Polish-American medical researcher, geneticist and professor of oncology at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, University of Wisconsin–Madison Medical School. Early life Wacław Szybalski was born in September 1921 in Lwów, Poland, into a Polish intelligentsia family. His father Stefan was an engineer, and his mother, Michalina née Rakowska, was a Doctor of Chemistry. The Szybalski family maintained close friendships with numerous leading representatives of the Polish intelligentsia in Lwów, including Professor Jan Czekanowski, the father of Polish anthropology,...
Go to Profile#1391
Rollo May
#327
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Rollo Reece May was an American existential psychologist and author of the influential book Love and Will . He is often associated with humanistic psychology and existentialist philosophy, and alongside Viktor Frankl, was a major proponent of existential psychotherapy. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich was a close friend who had a significant influence on his work.
Go to Profile#1392
Everett C. Olson
#28540
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Everett Claire Olson was an American zoologist, paleontologist, and geologist noted for his seminal research of origin and evolution of vertebrate animals. Through his research studying terrestrial vertebrate fossils he identified intervals of extinction in the Permian and Triassic. He developed the concept of chronofauna, which he defined as "a geographically restricted, natural assemblage of interacting animal populations that has maintained its basic structure over a geologically significant period of time". He also proposed stratigraphic correlations between North American and Russian vertebrate-bearing strata for which additional support was found much later.
Go to Profile#1393
David Kupfer
#44943
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David Jerome Kupfer is head of the psychiatry department at the University of Pittsburgh and head of the DSM-5 planning committee. He was awarded the Joseph Zubin Award in 1999.
Go to Profile#1394
Michael Balls
#23934
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael Balls is a British zoologist and professor emeritus of medical cell biology at the University of Nottingham. He is best known for his work on laboratory animal welfare and alternatives to animal testing.
Go to Profile#1395
Alexandra Elbakyan
#3173
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard for copyright. According to a study published in 2018, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.
Go to Profile#1396
Nicole Dubilier
#29389
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Nicole Dubilier is a marine microbiologist and director of the Symbiosis Department at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology since 2013 and a Professor of Microbial Symbioses at the University of Bremen. She is a pioneer in ecological and evolutionary symbiotic relationships between sea animals and their microbial partners inhabiting environments that harbour low nutrient concentrations. She was responsible for the discovery of a new form of symbiosis between two kinds of bacteria and the marine oligochaete Olavius algarvensis.
Go to Profile#1397
Per-Ingvar Brånemark
#6820
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Per-Ingvar Brånemark was a Swedish physician and research professor, acknowledged as the "father of modern dental implantology". The Brånemark Osseointegration Center , named after its founder, was founded in 1989 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Go to Profile#1398
Chihiro Sasakawa
#34201
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
is a Japanese bacteriologist well known for his pioneering research into the invasive mechanisms of pathogenic bacteria and the host’s subsequent immune response to infection. In his work on Shigella species and Helicobacter pylori, Sasakawa was an early adopter of a multi-disciplinary research strategy, combining molecular biology, cellular biology, biochemistry and immunological approaches. This research strategy and his discoveries greatly influenced later research on the invasive mechanisms of other pathogenic bacteria.
Go to Profile#1399
Harry F. Noller
#34398
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Harry F. Noller is an American biochemist, and since 1992 the director of the University of California, Santa Cruz's Center for the Molecular Biology of RNA. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of the ribosome and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1400
Jerry Adams
#39549
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jerry McKee Adams, FAA, FRS, FAHMS, FRSV is an Australian-American molecular biologist whose research into the genetics of haemopoietic differentiation and malignancy, led him and his wife, Professor Suzanne Cory, to be the first two scientists to pioneer gene cloning techniques in Australia, and to successfully clone mammalian genes.
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