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,

#14201

Nicholas Ingolia

#171282
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Nicholas Thomas Ingolia is an American molecular biologist and assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley. He is most known for the development of the method of ribosome profiling. He has also studied the evolution of heat-sensing nerves in vampire bats and the encoding of small peptides by brief open reading frames. Ingolia is a 2011 Searle Scholar and serves on a peer-review committee for the American Cancer Society.
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#14202

Clark Thomas Rogerson

Clark Thomas Rogerson
#146929
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Clark Thomas Rogerson, , was an American mycologist. He was known for his work in the Hypocreales , particularly Hypomyces, a genus of fungi that parasitize other fungi. After receiving his doctorate from Cornell University in 1950, he went on to join the faculty of Kansas State University. In 1958, he became a curator at The New York Botanical Garden, and served as editor for various academic journals published by the Garden. Rogerson was involved with the Mycological Society of America, serving in various positions, including president in 1969. He was managing editor and editor-in-chief of...
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#14203

Vishweshwaraiah Prakash

#121363
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Vishweshwaraiah Prakash is an Indian structural biologist, food technologist and a former director-general designate of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research . He is a former director of the Central Food Technological Research Institute , Mysore and was involved with the International Union of Food Science and Technology as the chairman of its International Academy during 2008-10. He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, the highest Indian award in the science and technology category in 1996. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma ...
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#14204

Kim Green

#171065
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kim Yarbrough Green is an American virologist. She is chief of the caliciviruses section in the laboratory of infectious diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She researches noroviruses in human disease, disease prevention, and control strategies.
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#14205

Jack Silver

#172369
Overall Influence
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#14206

Danny Welch

#152080
Overall Influence
Danny Ray Welch is an American cancer biologist and founding director of the University of Kansas Medical Center's Department of Cancer Biology. Welch is also a professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine and director of the National Foundation for Cancer Research Center for Metastasis Research at KU. His research is in the area of metastasis suppressor genes and the biology of metastasis.
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#14207

Odette Harris

Odette Harris
#61755
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Odette Harris is a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and the Director of the Brain Injury Program for the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the Deputy Chief of Staff, Rehabilitation at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System.
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#14208

Maurice Manning

#172391
Overall Influence
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#14209

Amanda Fosang

#79444
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Amanda Jane Fosang is a biomedical researcher who has pioneered arthritis research in Australia. Career Fosang is a principal research fellow with the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia who has an established career researching arthritis and cartilage biology in health and disease. She is professor and group leader of arthritis research at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute and the University of Melbourne Department of Paediatrics. Fosang returned to Australia after completing her post-doctoral studies at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London, and was awarded an RD Wright Fellowship by the NHMRC in 1994.
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#14210

Marina Joubert

#38481
Overall Influence
Marina Joubert is a senior science communication researcher at The Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University. Previously, she was the communication manager for the National Research Foundation and managed her own independent science communication consultancy for a decade. Her consultancy presented the first online course in science communication in Africa.
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#14211

Sue Jones

#75110
Overall Influence
Susan Jones is a British computational biologist and bioinformatics group leader at the James Hutton Institute. Her work is specially focused on plant pathogen diagnostics, particularly virus diagnostics, using large datasets of RNA-Seq data. She also works on functional genomics, transcription regulation, protein-protein and protein-nucleic-acid interactions.,
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#14212

Elizabeth Jonas

#74992
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Ann Jonas is an American physician and neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine where she is Professor of endocrinology and neuroscience. Her seminal work includes the first in vivo electrical recordings of mitochrondrial membrane potentials and influential research on metabolic pathways of neuronal death.
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#14213

Kim Soon-kwon

#129509
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Kim Soon-kwon is a South Korean maize specialist employed by Handong Global University. Early life Kim, better known in Korea as "Dr. Corn" or in Africa as "Green Revolutionary", was born to a poor family in Ulsan, on the southeast coast. This family depended on agriculture to survive, and Kim, as the son of the family, helped too. He studied at the Ulsan Agrarian Institute, expanding his agrarian knowledge. However, it was difficult to attend university because of his family's economic situation. Instead, he earned a scholarship and entered into the Faculty of Agriculture and Science of Life...
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#14214

Stefan Schulz

#172415
Overall Influence
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#14215

Elizabeth A. Widjaja

#134872
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Dr. Elizabeth Anita Widjaja is a Senior Principal Researcher of bamboo taxonomy at the Herbarium Bogoriense, Botany Division, Biological Research Centre at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences in Bogor, Indonesia. She is especially interested in Indonesian bamboo and Malesian bamboo generally, and promotes the cultivation of bamboo for the prevention of erosion.
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#14216

Johannes Hürzeler

#133267
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
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#14217

Theresa A. Jones

#118753
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Theresa A. Jones is a researcher and professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the Institute for Neuroscience. Her interests are in neural plasticity across the lifespan, motor skill learning, mechanisms of brain and behavioral adaptation to brain damage, and glial-neuronal interactions. Her research is on the brain changes following stroke, in particular rehabilitation strategies and the brain changes associated with them. She primarily tests rats and uses the Endothelin-1 stroke model. Her most recent work has expanded into the field of microstimulation mapping of the rat cortex.
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#14218

Maria Lehtinen

#147736
Overall Influence
Maria K. Lehtinen is a neuroscientist and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. She is a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Neuroscience Investigator and holds the Hannah C. Kinney, MD Chair in Pediatric Pathology Research at Boston Children's Hospital. Her research focuses on cerebrospinal fluid-based signaling in the central nervous system.
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#14219

Giovanni Di Chiro

#172429
Overall Influence
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#14220

Giovanna Mallucci

Giovanna Mallucci
#122222
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Giovanna Rachele Mallucci is van Geest Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge in England and associate director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. She is a specialist in neurodegenerative diseases.
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#14221

Laurinda Jaffe

#170432
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Laurinda A. Jaffe is an American biologist who is a Professor and chair at the University of Connecticut. Her research considers the physiological mechanisms that regulate oocyte cell and fertilisation. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
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#14222

Ross Bell

#94849
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Ross Taylor Bell was an American entomologist with particular interest in the invertebrate natural history of Vermont, United States, and carabid beetles. Together with his wife, Joyce Rockenbach Bell, his work at the University of Vermont was largely taxonomic, where they described more than 75% of the rhysodine species known to science. Ross also wrote a number of seminal papers in his chosen field.
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#14223

Carolyn Williamson

#120965
Overall Influence
Carolyn Williamson is a South African virologist and microbiologist who is a professor of medical virology at the University of Cape Town. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and the African Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. Her research focuses on HIV vaccine development and prevention of the disease.
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#14224

Kerstin Krieglstein

#170995
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Kerstin Krieglstein is a German neuroscientist. She is the head of the University of Freiburg since 2020, after serving in the same position at the University of Konstanz from 2018 to 2020. Personal life Kerstin Krieglstein was born in Erlangen, Germany. She is married to Klaus Unsicker, who is also a German neuroscientist. Together they have two children, Christine Unsicker and Sebastian Unsicker.
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#14225

Carolina Barillas-Mury

#171229
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Carolina Barillas-Mury is the chair of the Mosquito Immunity and Vector Competence Section and Director of the Malaria Research Program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. She studies how mosquitos transmit diseases like malaria, and in recognition of her research, she has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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#14226

Takao Shimizu

#172499
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
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#14227

Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena

#172425
Overall Influence
Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena is a Brazilian-American molecular entomologist. He is a professor in the department of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2002, his team loaded mosquitoes with a modified gene so that their guts produce a substance that kills off Plasmodium.
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#14228

Ivar Mendez

#86849
Overall Influence
Ivar Mendez is a neurosurgeon, neuroscientist and Professor of Surgery at the University of Saskatchewan. He is internationally known for his work in cell transplantation for Parkinson's disease and the use of remote presence robotics in neurosurgery and primary health care. In December 2022, Mendez was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada for his pioneering work in the use of remote telemedicine and robotics to revolutionize the delivery of health and patient care.
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#14229

Ling Meng

#162088
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Ling Meng is a Chinese plant biologist in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is best known for discovering a novel form of cellular communication in plants. Thioredoxin, while known to play an important role in biological processes such as cellular redox, is not fully understood in function. Meng's work at Berkeley has suggested that thioredoxin h9 is associated with the plasma membrane and is capable of moving from cell to cell through two important protein post-translation modifications: myristoylation and palmitoylation.
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#14230

Martha Christensen

#127888
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Dr. Martha Christensen was an American mycologist, botanist and educator known as an expert in fungal taxonomy and ecology, particularly for soil-dwelling fungi in the genera Aspergillus and Penicillium.
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#14231

Wilbur Howard Duncan

Wilbur Howard Duncan
#139297
Overall Influence
1910 - 2005 (95 years)
Wilbur Howard Duncan was a botany professor at the University of Georgia for 40 years where he oversaw an expansion in the school's herbarium collection and described three new plant species. Duncan also authored several books on plant species of the Eastern and Southeastern United States.
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#14232

Muzafer Mujić

Muzafer Mujić
#159993
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Muzafer Mujić is a Bosnian physiologist known for his contributions to classification of sympathomimetic drugs and comparative pharmacodynamics of imidazolines. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sarajevo and Editor-in-chief of Bosnian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences.
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#14233

Tuula Teeri

Tuula Teeri
#85045
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Tuula Teeri is a Finnish molecular geneticist and the President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences . She has previously been a Vice President at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and President of Aalto University from April 1, 2009 to 2017. Professor Teeri started as the President of IVA on November 1, 2017
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#14234

Cynthia Whitchurch

#152802
Overall Influence
Cynthia B. Whitchurch is an Australian microbiologist. Whitchurch is a research group leader at the Quadram Institute on the Norwich Research Park in the United Kingdom and was previously the founding director of the Microbial Imaging Facility and a Research Group Leader in the Institute of Infection, Immunity and Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney in New South Wales.
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#14235

Shane Campbell-Staton

#90054
Overall Influence
Shane C. Campbell-Staton is an American evolutionary biologist. Since July 2021, he has been an assistant professor in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at Princeton, where he leads a research group. His work is on how phenotypes respond to human activity that affects the environment. He also hosts the podcast 'Biology of Superheroes' together with Arien Darby.
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#14236

Amy Andreotti

#164420
Overall Influence
Amy Hamilton Andreotti is an American biochemist who is the Roy J. Carver Chair and University Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology at Iowa State University. Her research considers TEC kinases including Bruton's Tyrosine Kinase and IL-2 Inducible T-cell Kinase .
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#14237

Marina Zerova

#166048
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Marina Dmitrievna Zerova was a Ukrainian entomologist. Several insects have been named after her. She became , Professor and . In 1981 she was awarded the . Career In 1957 she graduated from the Department of Invertebrate Zoology in the Faculty of Biology, University of Kiyv. She had specialised in entomology under the guidance of Olexandr Filippovich Kryshtal. Until 1963, she worked at the Zoological Museum of Kiyv University, after which she entered the graduate school of the Institute of Zoology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In 1966, she defended her Ph.D. on research into wasps in the groups Eurytomidae and Harmolitinae.
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#14238

Kathleen Weathers

#171696
Overall Influence
Kathleen C. Weathers is an ecosystem scientist and the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Chair in Ecology at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Her expertise focuses on understanding the ecology of air-land-water interactions. Weathers is the current elected President of the Ecological Society of America .
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#14239

Neil Towers

#172566
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
George Hugh Neil Towers FRSC was Emeritus Professor of Botany at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was awarded the Flavelle Medal in 1986 and was cited extensively for his work in medicinal phytochemistry and ethnopharmacology of medicinal plants.
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#14240

Geraldine Butler

#158910
Overall Influence
Geraldine Butler is a geneticist at University College Dublin. Her research career has mostly been focused on the genetics of fungi. In 2015, she was elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Education Butler graduated in 1984 with a BA in genetics from Trinity College Dublin. On the same year, she began a PhD in genetics at the same institution, which she completed in 1989. She became a lecturer in 1992, a senior lecturer in 2002, an associate professor in 2006, and a full professor in 2012.
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#14241

Brian Litt

#111295
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Brian Litt is a Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Bioengineering at the Perelman School of Medicine and University of Pennsylvania. He is the former director of the Penn Epilepsy Center, and is director of the Center for Neuroengineering and Therapeutics.
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#14242

Katharina Ribbeck

#168655
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Katharina Ribbeck is a German-American biologist. She is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is known as one of the first researchers to study how mucus impacts microbial behavior. Ribbeck investigates both the function of mucus as a barrier to pathogens such as fungi, bacteria, and viruses and how mucus can be leveraged for therapeutic purposes. She has also studied changes that cervical mucus undergoes before birth, which may lead to a novel diagnostic for the risk of preterm birth.
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#14243

Kunio Shiota

#125168
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
is a Japanese life scientist specializing in biochemistry and epigenetics. He is a Professor Emeritus at University of Tokyo and a former Guest Senior Researcher at Waseda University. Biography He graduated from Kagoshima Prefectural Konan High School in 1969 and from Department of Veterinary Sciences, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Miyazaki in 1973. In 1979, he completed Department of Veterinary Medical Sciences, Graduate School of Agriculture, University of Tokyo and got Ph.D. in agriculture. After he completed the graduate school, he joined the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. In 1987,...
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#14244

John Ewel

#169459
Overall Influence
John Jeffrey Ewel is an emeritus professor and tropical succession researcher in the department of biology at the University of Florida. Most of his research was conducted through experimental trials to understand ecosystem processes in terrestrial and tropical environments. The results of the research provided the ability to further comprehend forest structure and management, as well as its nutrient dynamics. The primary research conducted dealt with the beginning stages of the regrowth and recovery following agriculture practices. Ewel also participated in studies regarding invasive species...
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#14245

Arthur H. Harris

Arthur H. Harris
#155025
Overall Influence
Arthur H. Harris is an American mammalogist and paleontologist. Education Arthur H. Harris spent his academic career at the University of New Mexico where he earned a Bachelor's degree in biology with a minor in anthropology , a Master of Science in zoology with a minor in botany and a PhD in vertebrate zoology with a minor in geochronology in 1965.
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#14246

Peter Matthiessen

#172623
Overall Influence
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#14247

Ann Nardulli

#100438
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Ann M. Nardulli was an American endocrinologist known for her research into the role of estrogen in breast cancer. Biography Ann Wannemacher was born in 1948 in Morrison, Illinois, to Rita and Rudolph Wannemacher of Hooppole.
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#14248

James Bliska

#172650
Overall Influence
James Bliska is an American molecular biologist, focusing on molecular mechanisms that underlie pathogenesis or host protection during host-microbe cell interactions, currently at Geisel School of Medicine and was Elected as Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013.
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#14249

Ana Maria Giulietti

#169178
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ana Maria Giulietti Harley is a Brazilian biochemist, botanist, and educator known for researching Eriocaulaceae, as well as her work at the University of São Paulo, State University of Feira de Santana, and Vale Institute of Technology. She has described over 70 species and gathered over 300 specimens. She was the 2013 recipient of the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany.
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#14250

Jennifer Nemhauser

#171677
Overall Influence
Jennifer Lyn Nemhauser is an American biologist and a Professor of Developmental Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. She specializes in synthetic biology, genomics, and signaling dynamics in plants.
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