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).

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

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#14451

Kenichi Yokoyama

#145880

Overall Influence

Kenichi Yokoyama is an enzymologist, chemical biologist, and natural product biochemist originally from Tokyo, Japan. He is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University School of Medicine. In 2019, Yokoyama was awarded the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

#14452

Karla Kaun

#172678

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Karla Renea Kaun is a Canadian behavioral neurogeneticist and the Robert and Nancy Carney Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Brown University. She studies addiction using fruit flies , as a model. Kaun is currently president of the International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society .

#14453

Michael Waterfield

#130552

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Michael Derek Waterfield was a British biochemist and cancer biologist. Biography Michael Derek Waterfield was born on 14 May 1941. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1991, and awarded its Buchanan Medal in 2002 "for his exceptional skill in protein biochemistry which have transformed our understanding of signal transduction, and the subversion of cellular signalling pathways in cancer". Waterfield died on 11 May 2023, at the age of 81.

#14454

Türkan Haliloğlu

#111846

Overall Influence

Türkan Haliloğlu is a Turkish biochemist researching biopolymers, computational structural biology, protein dynamics, binding and folding of proteins, and protein interactions. She is a professor in the department of chemical engineering and director of the polymer research center at the Boğaziçi University.

#14455

Christine Beveridge

#132390

Overall Influence

Christine Beveridge is an Australian scientist and plant physiologist whose research focuses on the shoot architecture of plants, shrubs and trees. She is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland, Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture, and affiliated professor at the Centre for Crop Science at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation.

#14456

Joel Gelernter

#171455

Overall Influence

Joel Eli Gelernter is an American psychiatric geneticist who is Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Genetics and of Neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine. He received his B.S. degree from Yale University and his M.D. from SUNY Downstate Medical Center. His research focuses on the genetics of psychiatric disorders, such as drug dependence and substance use disorders.

#14457

Amanda Ramirez

#82245

Overall Influence

Amanda Ramirez is Professor of Liaison Psychiatry, director of the Promoting Early Presentation Group at King's College London, director of Informed Choice about Cancer Screening at King's Health Partners and National Clinical Lead for Cancer Patient Information, National Cancer Action Team, now part of NHS Improving Quality.

#14458

Erin Dolan

#172269

Overall Influence

Erin Dolan is the Georgia Athletic Association Professor of Innovative Science Education at the University of Georgia. Dolan is a biochemist known for her research on engaging students in science research.

#14459

Liane Russell

#100346

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

Liane Brauch "Lee" Russell was an Austrian-born American geneticist and conservationist. Her studies in mammalian genetics provided the basis for understanding the chromosomic basis for sex determination in mammals and the effects occasioned by radiation, drugs, fuels and waste on mice. Her research allowed better understanding of genetic processes in mammals, mutagenesis and teratogenesis effects on mammals, and knowledge of how these processes can be prevented and avoided. She determined that developing embryos were most vulnerable to the effects of radiation during the first seven weeks of...

#14460

Rene Hurlemann

#139676

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Rene Hurlemann is a German psychiatrist and Full Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oldenburg. Early career Rene Hurlemann completed his M.D. at the University of Bonn in 2001, with a doctoral thesis on intracranial recordings in epilepsy patients. Later, he focused on stress-related emotion-memory interactions and received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Maastricht University in 2006 and 2007 respectively. In 2003 he became a resident physician at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Bonn and by 2013 became the head of the Medical Psychology Division at the same place.

#14461

Philippe Morat

#128274

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Philippe Morat is a researcher mainly in the field of tropical botany. He is a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences. Biography Agricultural engineer from the Ecole nationale supérieure agronomique de Toulouse, he was admitted to the Institut de recherche pour le développement in 1960 in the tropical botany section where he remained until 1986, successively in charge, master then research director during his assignments in Madagascar and New Caledonia .

#14462

Carlos José Correia de Azevedo

#174604

Overall Influence

Carlos José Correia de Azevedo is a Portuguese biologist specialising in microparasites of aquatic organisms, particularly Apicomplexa, Haplosporidia, Microsporidia, and Myxozoa. Career Carlos Azevedo is a retired Full Professor of the Abel Salazar Biomedical Sciences Institute, University of Porto, Portugal, where he taught Cell Biology until his retirement in 2004. After an initial focus on Spermatology , his research has focused on microparasites of aquatic organisms since 1985. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Center of Marine and Environmental Research of the University of Porto, as well as an Honorary member of Brazilian Society of Anatomy.

#14463

Soumen Basak

#173883

Overall Influence

Soumen Basak is an Indian immunologist and virologist at the National Institute of Immunology . A former fellow of the Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance, he is known for his studies on the NF-kappaB signaling system.

#14464

Eric Godley

#159313

Overall Influence

1919 - 2010 (91 years)

Eric John Godley OBE, FRSNZ, Hon FLS, Hon DSc , AHRNZIH was a New Zealand botanist and academic biographer. He is best known for his long-running series of in the popular magazine New Zealand Gardener and his "Biographical notes" series that ran in the New Zealand Botanical Society Newsletter and which is the prime resource on the lives of many New Zealand botanists.

#14465

Zsolt Liposits

#173061

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Zsolt Liposits is a Hungarian physician, neuroscientist and university professor. Career In 1976, he received MD degree from University Medical School Pécs and was appointed Lecturer in Anatomy. He was invited by Albert Szent-Györgyi Medical University and was appointed chairman of the Department of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology, Szeged, Hungary in 1993.

#14466

Gerhard Haszprunar

#106613

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Gerhard Haszprunar is Austrian zoologist and malacologist. He is credited with the invention of the modern species naming patronage model and is a founder of the BIOPAT non-profit organization. Honours and awards Cardinal Innitzer prize Prize of the city of Innsbruck for scientific research at the University of Innsbruck for the project "Monoplacophora" Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art

#14467

Jennifer Clare Jones

#113849

Overall Influence

Jennifer Clare Jones is an American radiation oncologist and biologist. She is an investigator and head of the translational nanobiology section at the National Cancer Institute. Education Jones completed a M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. She is a board-certified radiation oncologist specialized training in radiosurgery, with graduate and postdoctoral training in both cancer biology and general immunology. Her doctoral advisor was . Jones' dissertation in 2001 was titled, Identification of Tapr, a T cell and airway phenotype regulatory locus, and positional cloning of the Tim gene fam...

#14468

Lucia B. Rothman-Denes

#172162

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Lucia Beatriz Rothman-Denes is an Argentinian American microbiologist who is the A. J. Carlson Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Chicago. She is known for studying the regulation of transcription and host interactions that occur during bacterial virus infection. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

#14469

Margaret Goodell

Margaret Goodell

#77262

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Margaret A. Goodell is an American scientist working in the field of stem cell research. Dr. Goodell is Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine, Director of the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She is best known for her discovery of a novel method to isolate adult stem cells.

#14470

Sharlene Newman

#107741

Overall Influence

Sharlene D. Newman is an American cognitive neuroscientist, executive director of the Alabama Life Research Institute at the University of Alabama , Professor in the Department of Psychology at UA, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University.

#14471

Denis A. Evans

#174707

Overall Influence

#14472

Yossef Av-Gay

#172170

Overall Influence

Yossef Av-Gay, born in 1961, is a Canadian microbiologist of Israeli origin. He is a professor of Infectious Diseases in the Faculty of Medicine at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. He is also an associate member of the department of microbiology and immunology and holds an adjunct professorship at the medical school of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.

#14473

Tuifuisaʻa Patila Amosa

#91405

Overall Influence

Tuifuisaʻa Patila Malua Amosa is a Samoan oceanographer. She is Dean of Sciences at the National University of Samoa. Amosa was educated at Flinders University in Australia and the University of Otago in New Zealand, graduating with an MSc in Environmental Science in 2007 and a PhD in Chemistry in 2015. Her PhD was on ocean acidification.

#14474

Kathleen Gates

#126045

Overall Influence

Kathleen Marie "Katie" Gates is an American neuroscientist, quantitative psychologist, and faculty member in the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is known for her contributions to network analysis, time series analysis, and structural equation modeling toward the development and dissemination of methods for quantifying intra-individual change and person-specific processes as they unfold across time.

#14475

Sue Povey

#140905

Overall Influence

1942 - 2019 (77 years)

Professor Susan Povey FMedSci , was a British geneticist. Life She was born in Leeds, the daughter of Jack Povey, a physics teacher at St Michael's College, and his wife Margaret Robertson, a paediatrician who was the first female graduate of Leeds Medical School. She was educated at Notre Dame Collegiate School for Girls, and then entered Girton College, Cambridge.

#14476

Talita Fontoura Alves

#172852

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Talita Fontoura Alves is a Brazilian botanist. She is a professor of biology and botany at the State University of Santa Cruz in Ilhéus, Brazil. She is notable for the discovery and naming of Quesnelia alborosea, a member of the Bromeliaceae native to the Bahia area of Brazil.

#14477

Nicole Doria-Rose

#172813

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Nicole Amy Doria-Rose is an American biologist. She is chief of the humoral immunology core at the Vaccine Research Center. She develops and applies assays to evaluate HIV-1 specific antibody responses during natural infection and after immunization.

#14478

Arik Kershenbaum

#130195

Overall Influence

#14479

David Katzenstein

#110491

Overall Influence

1952 - 2021 (69 years)

David Katzenstein was an American virologist and prominent AIDS researcher. He was professor emeritus of infectious diseases and global health at Stanford University. Early life and education Katzenstein was born in Hartford, Connecticut. His father, Henry Katzenstein was a physicist, and his mother, Constance Allenberg Katzenstein, was a clinical psychologist. He attended the University of California, San Diego where he earned a BA in biology in 1973. He was an intern in internal medicine at the University of New Mexico, working with the indigenous tribes found there. He also received his MD...

#14480

William J. Sanders

#84756

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

William J. Sanders is a vertebrate paleontologist and research scientist/preparator at the University of Michigan. He has written a number of papers on fossil elephants. Education Ph.D. Department of Anthropology, New York University. Dissertation Title: "Function, Allometry, and Evolution of the Australopithecine Lower Precaudal Spine." 1995.M.Phil. Department of Anthropology, New York University. 1990.B.A. Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago. 1979.

#14481

David G. Clayton

#174786

Overall Influence

#14482

Peter Brian Heenan

#158834

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Peter Brian Heenan is a New Zealand botanist. Heenan has a 1984 diploma from Lincoln University, and graduated from the University of Canterbury with a PhD in 2000. Names published Alternanthera nahui Heenan & de Lange, New Zealand J. Bot. 47: 102 .Arthropodium bifurcatum Heenan, A.D.Mitch. & de Lange, New Zealand J. Bot. 42: 239 .Brachyscome lucens Molloy & Heenan, Phytotaxa 415: 35 .

#14483

Bente Gunnveig Berg

#164163

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Bente Gunnveig Berg is a Norwegian neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . Her research seeks to understand how the brain processes olfactory information, including how signals are encoded in a functional neural network. She is a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.

#14484

Stephanie Carlson

#124393

Overall Influence

Stephanie M. Carlson is the A.S. Leopold Chair in Wildlife Biology at the University of California Berkeley. Her research considers fish ecology, freshwater ecology, and evolutionary ecology. Education Carlson was the first member of her family to attend college. She earned her undergraduate degree in evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis. She moved across the United States for her graduate studies, joining the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Massachusetts for a master's degree. After completing her master's degree in 2002, Carlson...

#14485

Jadranka Lončarek

#170468

Overall Influence

Jadranka Lončarek is a Croatian cell and molecular biologist researching the molecular mechanism of centrosome biogenesis and their function, with particular attention on numerical control of centrosome formation in non-transformed and cancerous human cells.

#14486

Joan Robb

#169015

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Joan Robb was a New Zealand herpetologist and wildlife tour guide. Academic career Robb grew up in Gisborne, and was educated at home through the Correspondence School. After a Diploma in Agriculture from Massey Agricultural College, she studied at the University of Auckland, graduating with an MSc in zoology in 1956. Robb then worked in the Department of Zoology at the University of Auckland, becoming an associate professor in 1967. She taught vertebrate form and function. She retired in 1978, after which she became a tour guide for wildlife tours to Malaysia, Nepal, China, Australia, and Af...

#14487

Rosemary Collier

#172515

Overall Influence

Rosemary H. Collier FRES is an entomologist and applied ecologist in the UK. In 2019 she became professor at the University of Warwick. Education and career Collier did a BSc in Zoology, a MSc in Applied Entomology and a PhD looking at a group pest caterpillars, the cutworms. In 2010 she was appointed Director of Warwick Crop Centre and in 2019 she was appointed Professor at the University of Warwick.

#14488

Jean-Dominique Lebreton

#145142

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jean-Dominique Lebreton is a biomathematician and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Course Jean-Dominique Lebreton obtained a university degree in Mathematics and Physics in 1969, then a Certificate of Master of Mathematics and Fundamental Applications and a Master of Computer Science in 1971.

#14489

Anthony Whitaker

Anthony Whitaker

#129282

Overall Influence

1944 - 2014 (70 years)

Anthony Hume Whitaker was a New Zealand herpetologist, contributing a 50-year career of fieldwork, pioneering research and species discoveries. His is still the largest collection of reptile and amphibian specimens donated to Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

#14490

Jan Salick

#173471

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Jan Salick is an American botanist who researches the interaction between humans and plants and conservation biology. Her specialisms include alpine environmentss, climate change, indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge. She is a past-president of the Society for Economic Botany and holds their Distinguished Economic Botanist award. She is also Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. In 2019 she retired as Senior Curator of Ethnobotany at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and now has emerita status.

#14491

Nicola Royle

#173873

Overall Influence

Nicola Jane Royle is a British geneticist who heads the Telomere Research Group in the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology at the University of Leicester. She is a specialist in the cellular processes that affect the stability of telomeres, the essential DNA-protein structures that cap the ends of chromosomes and play significant roles in cancer and ageing.

#14492

Amanda Callaghan

#117787

Overall Influence

Amanda Callaghan FRES is an entomologist in the United Kingdom. Education and career Callaghan was awarded a PhD in Insect Biochemistry from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1989, she then moved to the University of Montpellier as a Royal Society Science Exchange fellow.

#14493

Keith Ablow

#71598

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Keith Russell Ablow is an American author, television personality, and former psychiatrist. He is a former contributor for Fox News Channel and TheBlaze. Formerly an assistant clinical professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, Ablow resigned as a member of the American Psychiatric Association in 2011, in protest to the APA's tacit support of transgender surgeries, which he considered irresponsible. Ablow's medical license was suspended in May 2019 by the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine. The board concluded he posed an "immediate and serious threat to the public health,...

#14494

Lucinda A. McDade

#174748

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Dr. Lucinda A. McDade is an American botanist and plant collector who is noted for her study of Acanthaceae and her work in conservation biology. She received her B.S. in Biology from Newcomb College of Tulane University, and her Ph.D. in Botany/Zoology from Duke University.

#14495

Patrick Brownsey

#172019

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Patrick John Brownsey was a British-born New Zealand botanist who specialised in the systematics of New Zealand ferns, and was for 44 years curator of botany at the National Museum of New Zealand and Te Papa.

#14496

Bríd Ryan

#157729

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Bríd M. Ryan is an Irish biomedical scientist and cancer researcher. She was an investigator at the National Cancer Institute from 2013 to 2021. Early life and education Ryan grew up on a farm and dairy in Ireland. She has five sisters. Ryan always enjoyed science and decided she wanted to be a cancer researcher as a teenager. She completed her undergraduate training in biochemistry at University College Cork in 2001. Ryan received her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from St. Vincent’s University Hospital and UCD School of Medicine and in 2005 was accepted into the National Cancer Institute Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program.

#14497

Elisabeth Tschermak-Woess

#170256

Overall Influence

1917 - 2001 (84 years)

Elisabeth Tschermak-Woess was an Austrian University lecturer, cytologist, and phycologist who worked with lichen photobionts. In 1994, Tschermak-Woess was awarded the Acharius Medal for her lifetime contributions to lichenology. She had a Festschrift dedicated to her in 1988, in the journal Plant Systematics and Evolution . Lichen taxa that have been named after Tschermak-Woess include the genus Woessia and the species Asterochloris woessiae.

#14498

Kent E Carpenter

#175047

Overall Influence

#14499

Alok Krishna Sinha

#173150

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Alok Krishna Sinha is an Indian molecular biologist, biochemist, plant physiologist and a staff scientist Grade VII at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research . Known for his research on Mitogen-activated protein kinase cascade in plants, he is a three-time Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India. 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 contributions to biosciences, in 2013.

#14500

Cat Hobaiter

#158761

Overall Influence

Catherine Hobaiter is a British primatologist focusing on social behaviour in wild chimpanzees and involved in long-term studies of chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda. She is particularly interested in the role gestures play in communication. She is a lecturer at the University of St Andrews.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions