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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Clear Form

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#14151

Christiaan Both

#170190
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Christiaan Both is a Dutch Associate professor of ecology at the University of Groningen. Early life Christiaan Both was born in the Netherlands in 1969. From 1988 to 1993 he studied in various universities including Groningen, Oxford and Wageningen. In 1998 he graduated with a Ph.D. from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and since that time worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Groningen, Bangor universities as well as University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2004 he joined Animal Ecology Group, a division of Groningen and three years later became Netherlands Organisation for Scientific...
Go to Profile
#14152

Tina Henkin

#171891
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Tina M. Henkin is a professor of microbiology, Distinguished University Professor, and Robert W. and Estelle S. Bingham Professor of Biological Sciences at Ohio State University. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology, and was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2019, she was reappointed to her Bingham professorship. Henkin researches how bacterial cells modulate gene expression in response to changes in their environment through effects on RNA str...
Go to Profile
#14153

David Greenwood

#171893
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#14154

Heather J. Lynch

#131782
Overall Influence
Heather J. Lynch is an associate professor of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University and the first Endowed Chair for Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook's Institute for Advanced Computational Science. She is a 2019 laureate of the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists and a National Geographic Explorer. Lynch uses satellite remote sensing, field work and mathematical models to better understand the population dynamics of the penguins of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Go to Profile
#14155

Srinivasan Ramachandran

#145843
Overall Influence
Srinivasan Ramachandran is an Indian biologist, bioinformatician and a senior principal scientist at the department of genome analysis of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology. Known for his studies in the field of data analytics, Ramachandran is also an adjunct faculty, senior Principal Scientist and AcSIR Professor at the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributi...
Go to Profile
#14156

Dora Emilia Mora de Retana

Dora Emilia Mora de Retana
#81431
Overall Influence
1939 - 2001 (62 years)
Dora Emilia Mora de Retana was a noted Costa Rican botanist, known primarily for her work with orchids. She compiled an extensive catalogue of the variations of the flower found in Costa Rica which became the seminal reference work on the family Orchidaceae in the country for over a decade. There are at least five species of orchids named in her honor and in 2011, a plaque bearing her name was installed at the Lankester Botanical Garden to recognize her contributions to its development.
Go to Profile
#14157

Jack Turban

#55198
Overall Influence
Jack L. Turban is an American psychiatrist and writer who researches LGBTQ health, with a focus on the mental health of transgender youth. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vox. He is an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at The University of California San Francisco and affiliate faculty in health policy at The Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.
Go to Profile
#14158

Carol A. Johnston

#155622
Overall Influence
Carol Arlene Johnston is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Natural Resource Management at South Dakota State University. Johnston is known for her research on beaver ecology and wetlands. Education Johnston earned a Bachelor of Science in Natural Resources from Cornell University. She then went on to earn a Master of Science in Land Resources and Soil Science, both degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Johnston also received her PhD in Soil Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Go to Profile
#14159

Lawrence G. Abele

Lawrence G. Abele
#135445
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Lawrence Gordon Abele is an American academic in the Department of Biological Science and the former Provost at Florida State University, where he is a distinguished professor, In 1994, he was appointed provost at Florida State, a position he held through 2010.
Go to Profile
#14160

Søren Laland

#140346
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
Søren Gustav Laland was a Norwegian biochemist. He was born in Bergen. He finished his secondary education in 1941, took the mag.scient. degree in chemistry at the University of Oslo in 1947 and his PhD at the University of Birmingham in 1951. His thesis was called Studies in Deoxy Hexoses and Deoxypentosenucleic Acids.
Go to Profile
#14161

Odd Henrik Sælen

#171823
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Odd Henrik Sælen was a Norwegian oceanographer. He was born in Bergen. He took the dr.philos. degree in 1963, became a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Oslo in 1965 and a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 1971. From 1978 to his retirement he served at the University of Bergen.
Go to Profile
#14162

Christine Ann Denny

#119796
Overall Influence
Christine Denny is an American neuroscientist and associate professor of Clinical Neurobiology in Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Denny investigates the molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory. She developed a novel technique to label neurons that encode specific memories. She used this technique to probe what happens to hippocampal memory traces in different disease states.
Go to Profile
#14163

Dimitri Krainc

#171760
Overall Influence
Dimitri Krainc is the Aaron Montgomery Ward Professor and Chairman of the Ken & Ruth Davee Department of Neurology and Director of the Simpson Querrey Center for Neurogenetics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He completed his research and clinical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he served on faculty until relocating to Northwestern in 2013. He was awarded the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award and outstanding investigator award from NIH, and is President-elect of the American Neurological Association. Krainc was electe...
Go to Profile
#14164

Elisabeth Huber-Sannwald

#91402
Overall Influence
Elisabeth Huber-Sannwald is an Austrian researcher specializing in ecosystem ecology. She is a Full Research Professor in Ecology and Global Environmental Change as well as the Department Head of Instituto Potosino de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica in San Luis Potosí, Mexico.
Go to Profile
#14165

Eve Van Cauter

#171989
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#14166

George Sangster

#115835
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
George Sangster is a Dutch ornithologist. He specialises in taxonomy and has written many articles on this subject for the magazines Dutch Birding, British Birds and other publications. He is a member of the Dutch, British and European taxonomic committees.
Go to Profile
#14167

Stoycho Vassilev Breskovski

Stoycho Vassilev Breskovski
#128919
Overall Influence
1934 - 2004 (70 years)
Stoycho Vassilev Breskovski was a Bulgarian paleontologist. Biography Stoycho Breskovski was the only son of educators Vassil Stoychev Breskovski and Paraskeva Breskovska . After receiving his primary and secondary education in Plovdiv, he studied geology at Sofia University and graduated in 1958. Then, he took active part in Bulgarian geological survey and in the preparation of the geologic map of Bulgaria at scale of 1:200,000. Later Dr. Breskovski was noted for his research on Lower Cretaceous, Barremian fauna. He was also credited for discovering, identifying and discerning several fam...
Go to Profile
#14168

Cassandra Extavour

Cassandra Extavour
#150769
Overall Influence
Cassandra Extavour is a Canadian geneticist, researcher of organismic and evolutionary biology, professor of molecular and cell biology at Harvard University, and a classical singer. Her research has focused on evolutionary and developmental genetics. She is known for demonstrating that germ cells engage in cell to cell competition before becoming a gamete, which indicates that natural selection can affect and change genetic material before adult sex reproduction takes place. She was also the Director of EDEN , a National Science Foundation-funded research collaborative that encouraged scienti...
Go to Profile
#14169

Nucharin Songsasen

#170023
Overall Influence
Nucharin Songsasen is a research biologist and head of the Center for Species Survival at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. Songsasen is an expert in global canid conservation, including maned wolves, African wild dogs, and dholes.
Go to Profile
#14170

Samira Mubareka

#133980
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Samira Mubareka is a Canadian microbiologist who is a clinical scientist at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Ontario. Her research considers the influenza virus, viral transmission and aerobiology. During the COVID-19 pandemic Mubareka isolated the genome of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in an effort to improve detection and diagnostics. She served as a member of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table.
Go to Profile
#14171

Stanley Hughes

#137575
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
Stanley John Hughes was a Canadian scientist who is known throughout the global field of mycology for developing and introducing a precise and meticulous system for classifying fungi that is still used today. A naturalized Canadian, he was a federal research scientist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada at what is today the Ottawa Research and Development Centre.
Go to Profile
#14172

Lindy McBride

#169112
Overall Influence
Carolyn McBride is an assistant professor who holds a joint position with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. She works on understanding the genetic and neural basis for behavioral evolution through the study of mosquitoes. She has received several early investor awards for her work on genetics, most notably the Rosalind Franklin Young Investor Award in 2016, the Pew Scholars Award in 2015, and the Searle Scholars award in 2016.
Go to Profile
#14173

Tatyana Dmitrieva

#62702
Overall Influence
1951 - 2010 (59 years)
Tatyana Borisovna Dmitrieva was a Russian psychiatrist, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences and Health minister. During the period of 1998-2010, she headed the Serbsky Center. She is the Director of the Serbsky State Research Centre for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, which is responsible for forensic psychiatry for criminal courts. She is also the Head of the Department for Social and Forensic Psychiatry at the Sechenov Medical Academy of Moscow and Vice-Chairperson of the Russian Society of Psychiatrists and Narcologists.
Go to Profile
#14174

Andrew Holding

Andrew Holding
#114400
Overall Influence
Andrew Holding MChem , PhD MRSC leads an academic research group at the University of York. His current research focus is the genetic drivers of breast cancer and has previously published research on antibiotic biosynthesis and DNA replication. Previously Holding was a Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and led the experimental team in the Markowetz lab at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute .
Go to Profile
#14175

James Serpell

#109714
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
James A. Serpell is professor of Animal Ethics and Welfare at the University of Pennsylvania. He lectures in the School of Veterinary Medicine on veterinary ethics, applied animal behavior and welfare, and human-animal interactions. Serpell also directs the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society . Serpell was a founder of The International Society for Anthrozoology and remains on the board.
Go to Profile
#14176

Stephen Curry

#172123
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#14177

Ana Cristina Rego

#168768
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Ana Cristina Rego is a Portuguese neurologist. She is a professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and is head of the research group on Mitochondria and Neurodegenerative disorders, researching on topics such as Alzheimer’s disease, Huntingdon's disease, and Parkinson’s disease. She is presently president of the Portuguese Society of Neuroscience.
Go to Profile
#14178

Reza Shadmehr

#74951
Overall Influence
Reza Shadmehr is an Iranian-American professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is known for his contributions to the fields of motor control, motor learning, and computational neuroscience.
Go to Profile
#14179

Howard Lipshitz

#168546
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Howard David Lipshitz is an American and Canadian biologist who does genetic research on the fruit fly, Drosophila. Early life and education Lipshitz was born and raised in Durban, South Africa, where he attended the University of Natal , obtaining a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences and Mathematical Statistics and a B.Sc. cum laude in Biological Sciences . He completed his M. Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Biology at Yale University with Douglas R. Kankel, working on Drosophila developmental neurogenetics. He then carried out postdoctoral research in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford Univers...
Go to Profile
#14180

Terry Desmond Macfarlane

#169335
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Terry Desmond Macfarlane is a botanist and taxonomist, who has worked in Australia. A senior research scientist at the Western Australian Herbarium, Macfarlane is associate editor of its journal Nuytsia and currently collaborates with researchers across Australia and in Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, Spain and United Kingdom. He was also involved in the development of FloraBase, the Western Australian flora database. His favourite child is June.
Go to Profile
#14181

Rüdiger Bieler

#167983
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Rüdiger Bieler is a German-American biologist whose primary scientific field of study is malacology, the study of mollusks. Training and career Bieler studied biology, geography, and biology education at the University of Hamburg , where he held a scholarship of the Studienstiftung. After extensive field research in South Africa he received a PhD degree in Zoology in 1985 under Otto Kraus. Following several postdoctoral research fellowships under the mentorship of Richard S. Houbrick and Mary E. Rice at the National Museum of Natural History , the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce,...
Go to Profile
#14182

Wilson José Eduardo Moreira da Costa

#95972
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Go to Profile
#14183

Paul Coulthard

#171120
Overall Influence
Paul Coulthard, BDS, MFGDP, MDS, FDSRCS, FDSRCS, PhD, FDSRCPS, FFDTRCS, FDSRCS, FCGDent is a British Academic Surgeon and Scientist. Career Coulthard was appointed Dean of the School of Dentistry at the University of Manchester in 2013. In 2018 he was appointed Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health at the University of Manchester and Head of the School of Medical Sciences. This School consisted of the Research Institutes of ‘Cancer Sciences’, ‘Cardiovascular Sciences’, ‘Developmental Biology & Medicine’, ‘Diabetes, Endocrinology & Gastroenterology’, and the ‘Manchester Medical School’ and ‘Manchester Dental School’.
Go to Profile
#14184

Shoba Ranganathan

#171953
Overall Influence
Shoba Ranganathan is an Indian Australian biochemist who is a professor of bioinformatics at Macquarie University. Her research considers computational biology and bioinformatics, genome annotation and structural bioinformatics.
Go to Profile
#14185

Martin Mork

#172190
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Martin Trygve Mork was a Norwegian oceanographer. He was born in Kristiansund. He became a professor of theoretical oceanography at the University of Bergen in 1972 and a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 1974.
Go to Profile
#14186

Gerard Baerends

#167795
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Gerardus Pieter Baerends was a Dutch biologist and one of the most important representatives of the so-called classical ethology in the tradition of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. Baerends' behavioral working group was the first of this specialty in the Netherlands and is still regarded as one of the world's most prolific, since from it alone 43 theses emerged.
Go to Profile
#14187

Myriam Gorospe

#108416
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Myriam Gorospe is a Spanish scientist, the head of the RNA Regulation Section at the National Institute on Aging since 1998. Her group studies the influence of RNA in cellular processes related to aging.
Go to Profile
#14188

Frank Kleffner

#71117
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Frank R. Kleffner was an American pathologist who was a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, noted for his contributions in the fields of speech and language pathology and hearing. His work with William Landau and Harold Klawans advanced his career beyond regular work in a neurology clinic. His name became well known for a controversial treatment for a disease affecting children under the age of five and causing acquired aphasia .
Go to Profile
#14189

Wei-Shau Hu

#94858
Overall Influence
Wei-Shau Hu is an American geneticist specialized in HIV research, retroviral recombination, RNA packaging, and virus assembly. She is a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute and head of the viral recombination section. She was an associate professor at West Virginia University.
Go to Profile
#14190

Alice Lazzarini

Alice Lazzarini
#94872
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alice M. Lazzarini is a scientist, author and researcher on neurogenetic disorders, including Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease. She is an assistant professor of Neurology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School , where her work helped establish the genetic basis of Parkinson's. Later in life, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's—the very disease she had spent decades researching.
Go to Profile
#14191

Tirin Moore

#142573
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Tirin Moore is an American neuroscientist who is a Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is known for his work on the neural mechanisms of visual perception, visually guided behavior and cognition. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
Go to Profile
#14192

Agenor Mafra-Neto

#125235
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Agenor Mafra-Neto is a chemical ecology researcher and entrepreneur in the entomological field of insect chemical ecology. He is the CEO of ISCA Technologies, a company specializing in the development semiochemical solutions for pest management, robotic smart traps and nanosensors. Dr Mafra-Neto is the CEO and Director of Research and Development at ISCA Technologies, Inc. which he founded in 1996 in Riverside, California. ISCA Tecnologias, Ltda was founded in Brazil in 1997.
Go to Profile
#14193

Éva Kondorosi

Éva Kondorosi
#151294
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Éva Kondorosi is a Hungarian biochemist who is known for her work on Rhizobium-legume symbiosis. She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2010. In 2015 she became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and in 2020 she was appointed as a Chief Scientific Advisor to the European Commission.
Go to Profile
#14194

Kate Storey

#123594
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Kate Gillian Storey is a developmental biologist and head of Division of Cell & Developmental Biology at University of Dundee. Research and career Storey is a developmental biologist who investigates cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate neural development. Her early work uncovered a fundamental cell signalling switch that controls when and where neural differentiation begins in the embryo...
Go to Profile
#14195

Martha Elizabeth Newton

#78655
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Martha Elizabeth Newton was a British bryologist and botanist, specialising in cytology and field surveying. Early life and education Newton was born in 1941 at her family's Lumm Farm, Littlemoss, Limehurst in Lancashire. She had one sister. She attended Littlemoss School and then Hyde County Grammar School for a year before transferring to the new Astley County Grammar School. She became interested in natural history as a child and her interest was encouraged by her parents. Newton attended University of Manchester and graduated in 1964 with a BSc, having specialised in botany and zoology. S...
Go to Profile
#14196

Jacob Weiner

#112261
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jacob Weiner is a plant ecologist at the University of Copenhagen. Weiner has made contributions to several areas of plant ecology, including competition, allocation, allometry and application of ecological knowledge to agricultural production.
Go to Profile
#14197

George Eickwort

#172322
Overall Influence
1940 - 1994 (54 years)
George Campbell Eickwort was an American entomologist and a professor at Cornell University. He was a specialist on the Halictidae but was recognized for his teaching skills for which he was awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching in 1986 from the Entomological Society of America.
Go to Profile
#14198

Carlos F. López

#110411
Overall Influence
Carlos Federico López Restrepo is a Colombian-American scientist who researches network-driven biological processes using computational tools. Until March 2022, López was an Associate Professor of Biochemistry & Pharmacology & Biomedical Informatics & Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He is currently a Principal Scientist and the Multiscale Modeling Lead at Altos Labs.
Go to Profile
#14199

Tamás Pócs

#107097
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Tamás Pócs is a Széchenyi Prize-winning Hungarian botanist, ecologist, and college professor, and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include the taxonomy and distribution conditions of mosses, tropical ecology, and the flora of Southwestern Transdanubia and the Southern Carpathians. His name is associated with the collection of many plant specimens and the description of one hundred and forty new plant species. Between 1991 and 1995 he was the president of the Hungarian Biological Society. His great-grandfather was a teacher, publicist and academic; his sist...
Go to Profile
#14200

Lauren Bakaletz

#171238
Overall Influence
Lauren Opremcak Bakaletz is a Professor of both Pediatrics and Otolaryngology at Ohio State University as well as the director of the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
Go to Profile