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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1401

J. A. Scott Kelso

#8391

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

J. A. Scott Kelso is an American neuroscientist, and Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences and Biomedical Science at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida and The University of Ulster in Derry, N. Ireland.

#1402

Andrea Brand

#38127

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Andrea Hilary Brand is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She heads a lab investigating nervous system development at the Gurdon Institute and the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. She developed the GAL4/UAS system with Norbert Perrimon which has been described as “a fly geneticist's Swiss army knife”.

#1403

Liqun Luo

#39938

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Liqun Luo is a neuroscientist in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, where he is the Ann and Bill Swindells Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His laboratory studies the development and organization of neural circuits, and he is the author of the textbook Principles of Neurobiology.

#1404

Robert M. Chanock

#26562

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Robert Merritt Chanock was an American pediatrician and virologist who made major contributions to the prevention and treatment of childhood respiratory infections in more than 50 years spent at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

#1405

Patrick H. O'Farrell

#39965

Overall Influence

Patrick H. O'Farrell is a molecular biologist who made crucial contribution to the development of 2-dimensional protein electrophoresis and Drosophila genetics. He is now a professor of Biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco and has a h-index of 67.

#1406

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker

#11269

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker is a German scientist and politician . He was a member of the German Bundestag and served as co-president of the Club of Rome jointly with Anders Wijkman 2011 – 2019.

#1407

Berta Scharrer

#34622

Overall Influence

1906 - 1995 (89 years)

Berta Vogel Scharrer was an American scientist who helped to found the scientific discipline now known as neuroendocrinology. Career She received her Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1930. She worked at the university with Professor Karl von Frisch, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his work with bees. After completing her education, Berta and her husband, Ernst Scharrer embarked on a remarkable scientific career together. Their journey began at the Research Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, where Berta focused on the study of spirochaete infections in th...

#1408

Robert Jay Lifton

Robert Jay Lifton

#1197

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Robert Jay Lifton is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory.

#1409

Meir Wilchek

#13569

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Meir Wilchek is an Israeli biochemist. He is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Early life and education Meir Wilchek was born in Warsaw, Poland, scion of a rabbinical family. During the Holocaust, he escaped from the German-occupied territories to the territories occupied by Russia, and was transferred to Siberia, while his father, who served as a community rabbi in Warsaw, was killed in Flossenbürg concentration camp. He survived, and immigrated to Israel in 1949 with his mother and sister. He graduated with B.Sc. in chemistry from Bar Ilan university and Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science.

#1410

Dario Alessi

#34120

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Dario Renato Alessi is a French-born British biochemist, Director of the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit and Professor of Signal Transduction, at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee.

#1411

Max Bennett

#12498

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Maxwell Richard Bennett is an Australian neuroscientist specializing in the function of synapses. Life Max Bennett was a student at Christian Brothers College, St Kilda and did his undergraduate work in electrical engineering and physics at University of Melbourne in 1959, where he founded the Athenian Society dedicated to understanding Plato, Aristotle and Wittgenstein. His interest in brain and mind led to postgraduate research in biology on synapses . In 1968 he took up a position as lecturer in physiology at Sydney University, where he was later awarded in 1980 the first and largest Centr...

#1412

Lawrence Hunter

Lawrence Hunter

#25315

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Lawrence E. Hunter is a Professor and Director of the Center for Computational Pharmacology and of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an internationally known scholar, focused on computational biology, knowledge-driven extraction of information from the primary biomedical literature, the semantic integration of knowledge resources in molecular biology, and the use of knowledge in the analysis of high-throughput data, as well as for his foundational work in computat...

#1413

David Jablonski

#30768

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Ira Jablonski is an American professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. His research focuses upon the ecology and biogeography of the origin of major novelties, the evolutionary role of mass extinctions—in particular the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event—and other large-scale processes in the history of life.

#1414

Andrew G. Clark

#41829

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Andrew G. Clark is an American population geneticist. He is currently Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Population Genetics in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and a Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator at Cornell University. He is the current head of the Graduate Computation Biology field. He is also co-director of Cornell's Center for Comparative and Population Genomics and a member of a working group for the National Human Genome Research Institute.

#1415

Claudio Daniel Stern

Claudio Daniel Stern

#42591

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Claudio Daniel Stern FRSB, FMedSci, FRS is a Uruguayan biologist currently working at University College London . Education Stern received his primary and secondary education in Montevideo, Uruguay, and started to study Medicine in 1971. In 1972 he moved to the United Kingdom and took a BSc in Biological Sciences at the University of Sussex, where he remained for his PhD , under the supervision of Brian Goodwin. He then moved to the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at University College London for postdoctoral training with Ruth Bellairs, a noted embryologist.

#1416

Herman Eisen

#41414

Overall Influence

1918 - 2014 (96 years)

Herman Nathaniel Eisen was an American immunologist and cancer researcher. He served on the faculty at New York University School of Medicine in the early 1950s, became the Chief of Dermatology at the Washington University School of Medicine in 1955, and was a founding member of the MIT Center for Cancer Research . Eisen retired and assumed professor emeritus status in 1989, but continued to be active as a researcher; he was working on a manuscript the day he died in 2014.

#1417

Brian K. Hall

#41903

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Brian Keith Hall is the George S. Campbell Professor of Biology and University Research Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Hall has researched and extensively written on bone and cartilage formation in developing vertebrate embryos. He is an active participant in the evolutionary developmental biology debate on the nature and mechanisms of animal body plan formation. Hall has proposed that the neural crest tissue of vertebrates may be viewed as a fourth embryonic germ layer. As such, the neural crest - in Hall's view - plays a role equivalent to that of t...

#1418

Arthur Mourant

#25528

Overall Influence

1904 - 1994 (90 years)

Arthur Ernest Mourant FRS was a British chemist, hematologist and geneticist who pioneered research into biological anthropology and its distribution, genetics, clinical and laboratory medicine, and geology.

#1419

Van Rensselaer Potter

#47891

Overall Influence

#1420

Joseph Biederman

#7582

Overall Influence

1947 - 2023 (76 years)

Joseph Biederman was Chief of the Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD at the Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Biederman was Board Certified in General and Child Psychiatry.

#1421

William Pearson

#29030

Overall Influence

William Raymond Pearson is professor of biochemistry and molecular Genetics in the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia. Pearson is best known for the development of the FASTA format. Education Pearson graduated with a BS in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in 1977 from Caltech. As a graduate student, he published several papers describing computer programs for analyzing biological data.

#1422

Martin Pickford

Martin Pickford

#26490

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Martin Pickford is a lecturer in the Chair of Paleoanthropology and Prehistory at the Collège de France and honorary affiliate at the Département Histoire de la Terre in the Muséum national d'Histoire. In 2001, Martin Pickford together with Brigitte Senut and their team discovered Orrorin tugenensis, a hominid primate species dated between 5.8 and 6.2 million years ago and a potential ancestor of the genus Australopithecus.

#1423

W. Maxwell Cowan

#29311

Overall Influence

1931 - 2002 (71 years)

William Maxwell Cowan was a South African neuroscientist known for his work on developmental plasticity and neural connectivity. He is credited with helping to contribute to the growth of modern neuroanatomy through his use of novel anterograde tracing techniques which fundamentally transformed the field in the 1970s. From 1978–2002 Cowan was the founding editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience. Cowan was vice-president and chief scientific officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1987 until his retirement in 2000.

#1424

David L. Felten

#24589

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

David L. Felten is an American neuroscientist. He is associate dean of clinical sciences at the University of Medicine and Health Sciences, and was formerly associate dean of research at Oakland University and vice president for research and medical director of the Beaumont Research Institute.

#1425

Thomas Gingeras

#37022

Overall Influence

Thomas Raymond Gingeras is an American geneticist and professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a leader of the National Institutes of Health's ENCODE project. He worked at Affymetrix as Vice President of Biological Sciences before joining CSHL. In 2019, he was listed as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. His son is the historian Ryan Gingeras.

#1426

Tim Hubbard

#30016

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Timothy John Phillip Hubbard is a Professor of Bioinformatics at King's College London, Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England and Honorary Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. Starting March 1, 2024, Tim will become the director of Europe's Life Science Data Infrastructure ELIXIR.

#1427

Hans Robert Schöler

#25335

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Hans Robert Schöler is a molecular biologist and stem cell researcher. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster. Biography Hans Schöler was born in 1953 in Toronto, Canada, came to Germany in 1960 and grew up in Paderborn, Munich and Heidelberg. After his studies of Biology at the University of Heidelberg, Schöler conducted the research for his doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1985 at the Centre for Molecular Biology .

#1428

Dean Roemmich

#37486

Overall Influence

Dean Roemmich is a contemporary American physical oceanographer. Roemmich was the early leader behind the sensors array Argo which continuously and globally measures vertical profiles of oceanic conditions, chiefly temperature and salinity.

#1429

Jack Pettigrew

#32227

Overall Influence

1943 - 2019 (76 years)

John Douglas "Jack" Pettigrew was an Australian neuroscientist. He was Emeritus Professor of Physiology and Director of the Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre at the University of Queensland in Australia.

#1430

Olaf Sporns

#17722

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Olaf Sporns is Provost Professor in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University and scientific co-director of the university's Network Science Institute. He is the founding editor of the academic journal Network Neuroscience, published by MIT Press.

#1431

Robert Horne

#39008

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Robert W. Horne was a British virologist and expert in electron microscopy. Life and academic career Horne was raised in Montreal and served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He began his scientific career at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where he began working with transmission electron microscopes with Vernon Ellis Cosslett. He received his master's and doctorate from the University of Cambridge. In 1961, Horne moved to what was then the Institute of Animal Physiology , and in 1968 he moved again to what became the John Innes Centre, directed by Roy Markham.

#1432

Marguerite Vogt

Marguerite Vogt

#32804

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Marguerite Vogt was a cancer biologist and virologist. She was most noted for her research on polio and cancer at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Early life Vogt was born in Germany in 1913. The youngest daughter of Oskar Vogt and French-born Cécile Vogt-Mugnier, Vogt took her M.D. degree from the University of Berlin in 1937. Her parents were prominent neuroscientists and she grew up in an intense scientific environment. Her older sister, Marthe Vogt was a neuropharmacologist who became a fellow of the Royal Society and a professor at Cambridge.

#1433

Azim Surani

#36229

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Azim Surani is a Kenyan-British developmental biologist who has been Marshall–Walton Professor at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge since 1992, and Director of Germline and Epigenomics Research since 2013.

#1434

Richard Wassersug

#23077

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Richard Joel Wassersug was an Honorary professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences at the University of British Columbia. He was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Medical Neuroscience at Dalhousie University with a cross appointment in the Department of Psychology. In addition, he is an adjunct professor at The Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society , La Trobe University.

#1435

Tania Singer

#16553

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Tania Singer is a German psychologist and social neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Max Planck Society's Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010, she became the inaugural chair of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich and was the co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich. Her research focuses on the developmental, neuronal, and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behavior and social emotions such as compassion and empathy. She is founder and principal investigator of the ReSource...

#1436

Bengt Bertil Samuelsson

#48358

Overall Influence

#1437

Harold G. Koenig

#14580

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Harold G. Koenig is a psychiatrist on the faculty of Duke University. His ideas have been covered in Newsweek and other news media with regard to religion, spirituality and health, a focus of some of his research and clinical practice. Templeton Foundation has provided great financial support to his activities.

#1438

Samuel Paul Welles

#30096

Overall Influence

1907 - 1997 (90 years)

Samuel Paul Welles was an American palaeontologist. Welles was a research associate at the Museum of Palaeontology, University of California, Berkeley. He took part in excavations at the Placerias Quarry in 1930 and the Shonisaurus discoveries of 1954 and later, in what is now the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. He accumulated an extensive collection of fossils of marine reptiles, amphibians, and fish, as well as describing the dinosaur Dilophosaurus in 1954 and the elasmosaur Fresnosaurus in 1943.

#1439

Helia Bravo Hollis

Helia Bravo Hollis

#41529

Overall Influence

1901 - 2001 (100 years)

Helia Bravo Hollis was a Mexican botanist who did research in the Faculty of Science at UNAM. Background and studies Helia Bravo Hollis was born and raised in Mixcoac, located in present-day Mexico City. Her interest in the study of living beings came from Sunday walks with her parents. She excelled in school from a young age. President Porfirio Diaz gave her recognition for her grades upon her completion of primary school.

#1440

Kirsten Bomblies

#34257

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Kirsten Bomblies is an American biological researcher. Her research focuses primarily on species in the Arabidopsis genus, particularly Arabidopsis arenosa. She has studied processes related to speciation and hybrid incompatibility, and currently focuses on the adaptive evolution of meiosis in response to climate and genome change.

#1441

Hubert Yockey

#17811

Overall Influence

1916 - 2016 (100 years)

Hubert Palmer Yockey was an American physicist and information theorist. He worked under Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project, and at the University of California, Berkeley. Yockey attended the University of California, Berkeley where he was awarded a bachelors in 1938 and a Ph.D. in 1942. In 1946 he married Mary Ann Leach.

#1442

Andreas Wagner

#29199

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Andreas Wagner is an Austrian/US evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. He is known for his work on the role of robustness and innovation in biological evolution. Wagner is professor and chairman at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zürich.

#1443

Bernard N. Fields

#24500

Overall Influence

1938 - 1995 (57 years)

Bernard Nathan Fields was an American microbiologist and virologist. Fields was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Fields was the Adele Lehman Professor and chairman of the department of microbiology and molecular genetics of Harvard Medical School, and he was the head of division of infectious diseases at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Prior to that, he was on the faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal Virology.

#1444

Charles Cantor

#25462

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Charles R. Cantor is an American molecular geneticist who, in conjunction with David Schwartz, developed pulse field gel electrophoresis for very large DNA molecules. Cantor's three-volume book Biophysical Chemistry, co-authored with Paul Schimmel, was an influential textbook in the 1980s and 1990s.

#1445

Yadin Dudai

#16336

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Yadin Dudai is a neuroscientist, Professor of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the Albert and Blanche Willner Family Global Distinguished Professor of Neural Science at New York University .

#1446

Thomas N. Seyfried

#29364

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Thomas N. Seyfried is an American professor of biology, genetics, and biochemistry at Boston College. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1976. His postdoctoral fellowship studies were in the Department of Neurology at the Yale University School of Medicine where he served as an assistant professor in neurology. He did undergraduate work at the University of New England, formerly St. Francis College, and received a master's degree in genetics from Illinois State University, Normal.

#1447

William H. Calvin

William H. Calvin

#21668

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

William H. Calvin is an American theoretical neurophysiologist and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is known for popularizing neuroscience and evolutionary biology, including the hybrid of those two fields, neural Darwinism. He relates abrupt climate change to human evolution and more recently has been working on global climate change issues.

#1448

Nancy Hopkins

#27080

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Nancy Hopkins, an American molecular biologist, is the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is known for her research identifying genes required for zebrafish development, and for her earlier research on gene expression in the bacterial virus, lambda, and on mouse RNA tumor viruses. She is also known for her work promoting equality of opportunity for women scientists in academia.

#1449

Amos Bairoch

#31787

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Amos Bairoch is a Swiss bioinformatician and Professor of Bioinformatics at the Department of Human Protein Sciences of the University of Geneva where he leads the CALIPHO group at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics combining bioinformatics, curation, and experimental efforts to functionally characterize human proteins.

#1450

Michael Wigler

#36895

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Michael Howard Wigler is an American molecular biologist who has directed a laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1978 and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for developing methods to genetically engineer animal cells and his contributions to cancer, genomics and autism genetics.

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