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,
#14051
Abraham J. Twerski
#25297
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Abraham Joshua Heshel Twerski was an Israeli-American Hasidic rabbi, a scion of the Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty, and a psychiatrist specializing in substance abuse. Early life and education Abraham Joshua Twerski was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His parents were Devorah Leah , daughter of the second Rebbe of Bobov, and Rabbi Jacob Israel Twerski , who was the rabbi of Beth Jehudah synagogue in Milwaukee. The elder Rabbi Twerski immigrated to America in 1927, and was a descendant of Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twerski, the founder of the Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty, and a student of the Baal Shem Tov. Twerski was the third of five brothers.
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Rosemary Bagot
#132818
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Rosemary C. Bagot is a Canadian neuroscientist who researches the mechanisms of altered brain function in depression. She is an assistant professor in behavioral neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her focus in behavioral neuroscience is on understanding the mechanisms of altered brain circuit function in depression. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, Bagot investigates why only some people who experience stress become depressed.
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Richard Pyle
#77804
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Richard Lawrence Pyle is a scuba diver and ichthyologist working on Hawaii. Pyle discovered the principle of "Pyle stops" when decompressing from many deep dives in search of new species of fish, and has identified hundreds of new species.
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Meaghan Creed
#84340
Overall Influence
Meaghan Creed is a Canadian neuroscientist and associate professor of anesthesiology at Washington University in St. Louis. Creed has conducted research on understanding and optimizing deep brain stimulation in the basal ganglia for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Her work has been recognized at the national and international level by Pfizer, the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the Whitehall Foundation, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation.
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Maria Uriarte
#162453
Overall Influence
María Uriarte is an ecologist who specializes in the processes that drive tropical forest dynamics, especially after extreme weather events. She is currently a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Science at Columbia University and serves as adjunct faculty in the Department of Ecology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She conducts research primarily in Puerto Rico and Brazil and is associated with the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments tropics and ForestGeo research groups.
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Teófilo Herrera Suárez
#167943
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Teófilo Herrera Suárez was a Mexican mycologist who was known for his contributions to the Mexican mycological flora. He was also an emeritus professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico , where he worked for over 50 years.
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Geraldine Pittman Woods
#77533
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Geraldine Pittman Woods was an American science administrator. She is known for her lifelong dedication to community service and for establishing programs that promote minorities in STEM fields, scientific research, and basic research.
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Jacqueline Jakway
#168548
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Jacqueline Halle Sinks Jakway a professor of anatomy and cell biology. Background Jakway was born Jacqueline Halle Sinks in 1928 in Puerto Rico, later moving to Missouri. Jakway attended Joplin High School in 1946, followed by attending Park College in Parkville, earning a BA in biology in 1950, and then in 1958 pursued a PhD in anatomy from the University of Kansas. Jakway worked her postdoc at the University of Nebraska becoming an assistant professor of anatomy at the University of Southern California in 1961. Jakway then moved to New York and taught gross anatomy and neuroanatomy as an as...
Go to Profile#14059
Hidenori Suzuki
#171008
Overall Influence
#14060
Peter B. Best
#147515
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Peter Barrington Best was an English marine biologist known for his research on whales and dolphins of Southern Africa. He was described as the world's foremost authority on the whales and dolphins of the Southern African region.
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Michael Meyer-Hermann
#134963
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Michael Meyer-Hermann is a professor at the Technical University of Braunschweig and head of the department of Systems Immunology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research. Career Meyer-Hermann studied Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy in Frankfurt and Paris. His diploma thesis titled "QCD-Summenregeln mit Massen" about Quantum chromodynamics was published in 1993. In 1997, he finished his doctorate in theoretical Particle Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He founded the research group "Theoretical Biophysics" at the Technical University Dresden in 1998 which he headed until 2003.
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John D. Liu
#123098
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Dennis Liu is a Chinese American film-maker and ecologist. He is also a researcher at several institutions. In January 2015 John was named Visiting Fellow at Netherlands Institute of Ecology of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. John is also Ecosystem Ambassador for the Commonland Foundation based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In 2017 John Liu founded Ecosystem Restoration Camps, a worldwide movement that aims to restore damaged ecosystems on a large scale.
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Roger A. Beaver
#62922
Overall Influence
Roger Anthony Beaver is a biologist who has worked at University College of North Wales, Chiang Mai University, the University of Zambia and the University of the South Pacific. He has published several important papers on Nepenthes infauna, including "Fauna and food webs of pitcher plants in West Malaysia" , "The communities living in Nepenthes pitcher plants: fauna and food webs" , and "Geographical variation in food web structure in Nepenthes pitcher plants" . The species Cryptoxilos beaveri was named in his honour.
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Murray Heimberg
#171037
Overall Influence
Murray Heimberg is an American medical scientist currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
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Euripedes Constantino Miguel
#91879
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Euripedes Constantino Miguel Filho is a Brazilian psychiatrist. He is a graduate of the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo . He currently holds the title of Full Professor and is the Vice-Head of the FMUSP Department of Psychiatry. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Duke University and at Yale University , as well as being a Research Consultant for Harvard University School of Medicine Massachusetts General Hospital. Miguel has authored or co-authored more than 150 articles published in journals indexed for the major international databases. Since 2004, he has coordinated the Consórcio Brasileiro de Pesquisa dos Transtornos do Espectro Obsessivo-Compulsivo .
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Eileen Furlong
#170928
Overall Influence
Eileen E. M. Furlong is an Irish molecular biologist working in the fields of transcription, chromatin biology, developmental biology and genomics. She is known for her work in understanding how the genome is regulated, in particular to how developmental enhancers function, how they interact within three dimensional chromatin topologies and how they drive cell fate decisions during embryogenesis. She is Head of the Department of Genome Biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory . Furlong was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2013, the Academia Europ...
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Tony Rees
#118049
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Anthony J. J. Rees is a British-born software developer, data manager and biologist resident in Australia since 1986, and previously a data manager with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. He is responsible for developing a number of software systems currently used in science data management, including c-squares, Taxamatch, and IRMNG, the Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera. He has also been closely involved with the development of other biodiversity informatics initiatives including the Ocean Biogeographic Information System , AquaMaps, and the iPlant Taxonomic Name Resolutio...
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Linda Randall
#168736
Overall Influence
Linda Randall is a Professor Emerita of Biochemistry and Wurdack Chair Emerita of Biological Chemistry at the University of Missouri. Her research has shown unexpected and complex details of the movement of newly made proteins from the cytosol across membranes into the organelles of the cell. In particular, she found that the entire protein was kept unfolded by association with a chaperone and not just directed to cross membranes by its terminal leader sequence. In 1997, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA because of the excellence of this work. She has received a ...
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Shyam Prabhakaran
#165350
Overall Influence
Shyam K. Prabhakaran is an American vascular neurologist. He is the James Nelson and Anna Louise Raymond Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurology at the University of Chicago. Early life and education Prabhakaran grew up in New Jersey. He completed his undergraduate degree at Boston University and qualified for the Dean's list in 1996. Prabhakaran then earned his medical degree at New Jersey Medical School and completed his internship and residnecy at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. He also earned his Master of Science degree at Columbia University.
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Lesley Rhodes
#150174
Overall Influence
Lesley Louise Rhodes is a New Zealand scientist. She is the co-leader of the Nationally Significant Database programme for the Cawthron Institute. In the 2017 Queen's Birthday Honours, she was named as a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition for her contributions to science and marine farming.
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Vanessa Ezenwa
#168816
Overall Influence
Vanessa Olivia Ezenwa is an American ecologist who is a professor at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia. Her research considers the ecology of infectious diseases amongst animal populations. In 2020, she was selected by The Community of Scholars as one of the most Inspiring Black scientists in the United States.
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Vitaly Napadow
#132795
Overall Influence
Vitaly Napadow is a Ukrainian-born American neuroscientist and acupuncturist. He is a full professor of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Radiology at Harvard Medical School. He is also the Director of the Scott Schoen and Nancy Adams Discovery Center for Recovery from Chronic Pain at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and Director of the Center for Integrative Pain NeuroImaging at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a former president of the Society for Acupuncture Research. He has been a pain neuroimaging researcher for more than 20 years. ...
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Travis Huxman
#170581
Overall Influence
Travis E. Huxman is an American plant physiological ecologist. Early life and education Huxman completed his Bachelor of Science and Master's degree from the California State University, San Bernardino and his PhD in biological science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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Florian Markowetz
#167904
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Florian Markowetz is the Professor of Computational Oncology at the University of Cambridge. He is a Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and Director and co-founder of Tailor Bio, a genomics company aiming to improve precision medicine for cancers with high levels of chromosomal instability.
Go to Profile#14075
Velvl Greene
#68803
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Velvl Greene was a Canadian–American–Israeli scientist and academic. Specializing in public health and bacteriology, he was a professor of public health and microbiology at the University of Minnesota from 1959 to 1986, teaching over 30,000 students. He developed the first university-level curriculum in environmental microbiology in response to an outbreak of staph infections at American hospitals in the late 1950s. In 1961 he began working for the NASA Planetary Quarantine Division in an exobiology program that sought to determine the presence of microbes in outer space. He immigrated to Isr...
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Sheila Lukehart
#171036
Overall Influence
Sheila Lukehart is an American physician who is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington. Her research covered immune responses and the pathogenesis of syphilis. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology.
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Susan Bradley
#64043
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Susan Jane Bradley is a Canadian psychiatrist. She has written many journal articles and books, including Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents and Affect Regulation and the Development of Psychopathology. Bradley was chair of the DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Disorders.
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Steven A. Farber
#130205
Overall Influence
Steven Arthur Farber is an American scientist. He is a staff scientist at Carnegie Institution for Science. Education Steven Arthur Farber completed a bachelor of science in engineering with a major in electrical and biomedical engineering from Rutgers University in 1986. He earned a master of science in technology and policy in 1991 and a doctor of philosophy in neurology in 1993 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His dissertation was titled Neuronal activity and membrane turnover in rat brain. His thesis supervisor was Richard Wurtman. Farber was a Carnegie Fellow in Marnie Halpern's ...
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Antonio Arnaiz-Villena
#168161
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Antonio Arnaiz-Villena is a Spanish immunologist noted for his controversial research into the genetic history of ethnic groups and fringe linguistic hypotheses. Biography Arnaiz-Villena was president of Spain's National Society of Immunology from 1991 to 1995. He has written more than 300 papers in immunology and human and bird population genetics.
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Gladys W. Royal
#104499
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Gladys W. Royal is one of a small number of early African-American biochemists. Part of one of the few African-American husband-and-wife teams in science, Gladys worked with George C. Royal on research supported by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. She later worked for many years as principal biochemist at the Cooperative State Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Royal was also active in the civil rights movement in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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Alexander L. Bond
#169214
Overall Influence
Alexander L. Bond is a Canadian conservation biologist, ecologist, and curator. He is a senior curator at the Natural History Museum at Tring. Education Bond completed a B.Sc. with Honors in biology from Mount Allison University in 2005 and published a thesis titled Daytime spring migrations of scoters in the Bay of Fundy. He earned an M.Sc. from University of New Brunswick in 2007. His thesis was entitled Patterns of mercury burden in the seabird community of Machias Seal Island, New Brunswick. Bond completed a Ph.D. in 2011 at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His thesis there was called...
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Jean-Antoine Rioux
#103764
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Jean-Antoine Rioux was a French parasitologist, mainly a specialist of leishmaniasis. He coined the term ecoepidemiology for a discipline combining concepts of ecology and epidemiology to understand parasite transmission patterns and processes. He was a professor at the University of Montpellier, France, and one of the founders of the Société Française de Parasitologie in 1962.
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Denise Cai
#135272
Overall Influence
Denise Cai is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Education and early career Cai attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Bachelor of Science in psychology in 2004. There, she performed an honors thesis under the mentorship of Ebbe Ebbesen entitled "Computational model of rape and assault cases." She continued her education at UCSD, pursuing her doctoral degree in Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, working with advisors Sara Mednick, Stephan Anagnostaras, and Michael Gorman. Her graduate work focused on how sleep affects memory formation in humans and in mice.
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Chantal Stern
#136807
Overall Influence
Chantal Stern is a neuroscientist who uses techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain mechanisms of memory function. She is the Director of the Brain, Behavior and Cognition program and a professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. After completing a degree at McGill University, she performed her doctoral research at Oxford University with Richard Passingham.
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Bernardo Javier González Riga
#72074
Overall Influence
Bernardo Javier González Riga is an Argentine palaeontologist; he is internationally recognised for his research on sauropod dinosaur evolution, and was awarded in 2019. He discovered in the Late Cretaceous strata of the Mendoza Province the huge sauropod dinosaur Notocolossus, one of the largest land animals ever found. He also described and co-described more than ten new dinosaur species.
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Alan M. Roberts
#86218
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Alan Madoc Roberts FRS is an English academic serving as Emeritus professor of Zoology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol. Education Roberts was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, where he studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. He went on to study at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a PhD in 1967 for research supervised by Theodore Holmes Bullock on the escape response of Crayfish.
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Martyn Jope
#111959
Overall Influence
1915 - 1996 (81 years)
Edward Martyn Jope was an English archaeologist and chemist. He worked temporarily during the Second World War as a biochemist. Following the war, he returned to working in archaeology, first as a medievalist and later as a prehistorian.
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Paul Breslin
#104875
Overall Influence
Paul Breslin is a geneticist and biologist. He is most notable for his work in taste perception and oral irritation, in humans as well as in Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. He is a member of the faculty at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and acts as director of the Science Apprenticeship Program. He is a professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Breslin and two colleaguesdiscovered that Oleocanthal, a compound found in extra-virgin olive oil kills a variety of human cancer cells without harming healthy cells.
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Anne La Flamme
#171236
Overall Influence
Anne Camille La Flamme is a New Zealand immunologist. She is currently a professor at the Malaghan Institute at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She has a MSc entitled 'Interleukin-2 production by transgenic Trypanosoma cruzi : molecular and biochemical characterization' and a PhD entitled 'Trypanosoma cruzi-infected macrophages are defective in class II antigen presentation,' both from the University of Washington.
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Robin Crompton
#169602
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robin Huw Crompton is professor of musculoskeletal biology at the University of Liverpool in the Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease. He has developed the Fossil Footprint Archive jointly with Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University. He has criticized the March of Progress image for implying that the common ancestor taxon of all great apes wouldn't have been bipedal, when fossil evidence suggests it would have been.
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Jan Erik Weber
#169924
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jan Erik Hobæk Weber is a Norwegian oceanographer. He was born in Gjerpen. He took the dr.philos. degree in 1974, became a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Oslo in 1979 and a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 1988.
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Stanley John Olsen
#126689
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Stanley John Olsen was an American vertebrate paleontologist and one of the founding figures of zooarchaeology in the United States. Olsen was also recognized as an historical archaeologist and scholar of United States military insignia, especially buttons of the American Colonial through Civil War periods. He was the father of John W. Olsen.
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Michael Green
#128478
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Michael Green was an American molecular biologist and cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he was the chair of the Department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology, director of the UMass Cancer Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Green was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#14094
Elizabeth Maywood
#169800
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Maywood is an English researcher who studies circadian rhythms and sleep in mice. Her studies are focused on the suprachiasmatic nucleus , a small region of the brain that controls circadian rhythms.
Go to Profile#14095
Barry E. Stein
#146117
Overall Influence
Barry E. Stein the Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, where he is also Professor of Neurology. He is also director of the joint Cognitive Neuroscience PhD Program between Wake Forest University and the University of Bologna in Italy.
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Roman Dziarski
#170778
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Roman Dziarski is a Polish-born American immunologist and microbiologist. He is best known for his research on innate immunity and bacterial peptidoglycan, for discovering the family of human peptidoglycan recognition proteins, which comprises PGLYRP1, PGLYRP2, PGLYRP3, and PGLYRP4, and for defining the functions of these proteins.
Go to Profile#14097
Kunihiro Matsumoto
#171325
Overall Influence
#14098
Geoff Jameson
#145407
Overall Influence
Geoffrey Brind Jameson is a structural chemist and biologist at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Jameson completed a PhD at the University of Canterbury in 1977. He is the director of the Centre for Structural Biology, and a crystallographer, using X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy to determine the structure of materials.
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Liz Slooten
#144516
Overall Influence
Elisabeth Slooten is a New Zealand zoology academic. She is currently a full professor at the University of Otago. Biography After secondary school in the Netherlands and a BSc and MSc in marine biology at the University of Auckland, Slooten completed a 1990 PhD from the University of Canterbury entitled Population biology, social organization and behaviour of Hector's Dolphins. Moving to the University of Otago for an extended period, she rose to the rank of full professor in 2015.
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Andrew Biankin
#88673
Overall Influence
Andrew Victor Biankin is a Scotland-based Australian clinician-scientist, best known for his work on enabling precision oncology in learning healthcare systems by integrating discovery, preclinical and clinical development to accelerate novel therapeutic strategies, and developing standardised pan-cancer assays for use by healthcare systems and researchers worldwide.
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