Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1451

Marilyn Kozak

#26792

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Marilyn S. Kozak is an American professor of biochemistry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She was previously at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey before the school was merged. She was awarded a PhD in microbiology by Johns Hopkins University studying the synthesis of the Bacteriophage MS2, advised by Daniel Nathans. In her original faculty job proposal, she sought to study the mechanism of eukaryotic translation initiation, a problem long thought to have already been solved by Joan Steitz. While in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Pittsbu...

#1452

Brigid Hogan

#34034

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Brigid L. M. Hogan FRS is a British developmental biologist noted for her contributions to mammalian development, stem cell research and transgenic technology and techniques. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Duke University, Born in the UK, she became an American citizen in 2000.

#1453

Larry Swanson

#40490

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Larry W. Swanson is an American neuroscientist who has held positions at Washington University School of Medicine, The Salk Institute of Biological Studies and the University of Southern California, focusing on how the nervous system functions. Swanson is best known for his complex studies in how neurons control different aspects of motivation and emotional behavior.

#1454

John Todd

#19568

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Todd is a Canadian biologist working in the general field of ecological design. He addresses problems of food production and wastewater processing by using ecosystems technologies that incorporate plants, animals and bacteria. Todd has developed "Arks" or "bioshelters", ecologically closed "life-support systems" with the goal of sustainable functioning. He combines alternative technologies for renewable energy, organic farming, aquaculture, hydroponics and architecture to create "living machines" or "eco-machines".

#1455

Liam Dolan

#43624

Overall Influence

Liam Dolan is a Senior Group Leader at the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Sherardian Professor of Botany in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

#1456

Victor Ling

#34202

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Victor Ling, is a Canadian researcher in the field of medicine. Ling's research focuses on drug resistance in cancer. He is best known for his discovery of P-glycoprotein, one of the proteins responsible for multidrug resistance.

#1457

Jonathan Wells

#13284

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

John Corrigan "Jonathan" Wells is an American author, theologian, and advocate of the pseudoscientific argument of intelligent design. Wells joined the Unification Church in 1974, and subsequently wrote that the teachings of its founder Sun Myung Moon, his own studies at the Unification Theological Seminary and his prayers convinced him to devote his life to "destroying Darwinism." The term Darwinism is often used by intelligent design proponents and other creationists to refer to the scientific consensus on evolution. He gained a PhD in religious studies at Yale University in 1986, then became Director of the Unification Church's inter-religious outreach organization in New York City.

#1458

Eric J. Barron

#9430

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Eric James Barron is an American academic administrator who was the 18th president of Pennsylvania State University from 2014 until 2022. He previously was the 14th president of Florida State University and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

#1459

Carlos Arias Ortiz

#42610

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Carlos Federico Arias Ortiz is a Mexican biochemist specialized in rotaviruses. Along his wife, Susana López Charretón, he has been a co-recipient of both the 2001 Carlos J. Finlay Prize for Microbiology and the 2008 TWAS Prize in Biology.

#1460

Drew Endy

#18774

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Andrew David Endy is a synthetic biologist and tenured associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, California. Education and Work History Endy received his PhD from Dartmouth College in 1997 for his work on genetic engineering using T7 phage.

#1461

John Postgate

#26812

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

John Raymond Postgate , FRS was an English microbiologist and writer, latterly Professor Emeritus of Microbiology at the University of Sussex. Postgate's research in microbiology investigated nitrogen fixation, microbial survival, and sulphate-reducing bacteria. He worked for the Agricultural Research Council's Unit of Nitrogen Fixation from 1963 until he retired, by then its Director, in 1987. In 2011, he was described as a "father figure of British microbiology".

#1462

Fernand Labrie

#38147

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Fernand Labrie, was a Canadian medical researcher who specializes in endocrinological research and prostate cancer research. Life and career Born in Laurierville, Quebec, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1957 from the Séminaire de Québec. He received his Doctor of Medicine in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1966 from Université Laval. From 1966 to 1969, he took his postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sussex.

#1463

Patrick A. Baeuerle

#40220

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Patrick Baeuerle is a German-based molecular biologist, immunologist, professor and a biopharmaceutical entrepreneur. Baeuerle is known for his work on tyrosine sulfation of proteins, transcription factor NF-kappaB, and the development of bispecific T-cell engaging antibodies for therapy of cancer.

#1464

Dafna D. Gladman

#26754

Overall Influence

Dafna D. Gladman, MD, FRCPC, is a Canadian doctor and medical researcher working in the fields of psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and rheumatoid arthritis. She is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Senior Scientist at the Krembil Research Institute. She is Deputy Director, Centre for Prognosis Studies in the Rheumatic Diseases , Co-Director, Lupus Clinic, Toronto Western Hospital and Director, Psoriatic Arthritis Program, Toronto Western Hospital.

#1465

David D. Burns

#3881

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

David D. Burns is an American psychiatrist and adjunct professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is the author of bestselling books such as Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, The Feeling Good Handbook and Feeling Great: The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety.

#1466

Fernando Novas

#31746

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Fernando Emilio Novas is an Argentine paleontologist working for the Comparative Anatomy Department of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Novas holds a PhD in Natural sciences.

#1467

Mark Daly

#30618

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Mark Joseph Daly is Director of the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine at the University of Helsinki, a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Analytic and Translational Genetic Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In the early days of the Human Genome Project, Daly helped develop the genetic model by which linkage disequilibrium could be used to map the haplotype structure of the human genome. In addition, he developed statistical methods to find associations between genes and disorders such as Crohn's di...

#1468

Lisa Levin

#40123

Overall Influence

Lisa A. Levin is a Distinguished Professor of biological oceanography and marine ecology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She holds the Elizabeth Hamman and Morgan Dene Oliver Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation Science. She studies coastal and deep-sea ecosystems and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#1469

Craig B. Thompson

Craig B. Thompson

#17186

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Craig B. Thompson is an American cell biologist and a former president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Education and career Thompson received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and went on to earn his medical degree in 1977 from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He received clinical training in internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and in medical oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at the University of Washington. After completing his training, Thompson became a physician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and an assistant professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

#1470

Albert Lester Lehninger

#49078

Overall Influence

#1471

Peter Goadsby

#33344

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Peter Goadsby FRS FRACP FRCP is an Australian neuroscientist who is Director of the National Institute for Health Research - Wellcome Trust King’s Clinical Research Facility and Professor of Neurology at King's College London. His research has focused particularly on the mechanism and alleviation of migraine and cluster headaches.

#1472

John H. Gillespie

#33292

Overall Influence

John H. Gillespie is an evolutionary biologist interested in theoretical population genetics and molecular evolution. In molecular evolution, he emphasized the importance of advantageous mutations and balancing selection. For that reason, Gillespie is well known for his selectionist stance in the neutralist-selectionist debate. He is widely considered the main proponent of natural selection in molecular evolution. He had a well-known feud with the father of the neutral theory of molecular evolution, Motoo Kimura, initiated by a 1984 review in Science of Kimura's book in which Gillespie critic...

#1473

Berhane Asfaw

#12449

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Berhane Asfaw is an Ethiopian paleontologist of Rift Valley Research Service, who co-discovered human skeletal remains at Herto Bouri, Ethiopia later classified as Homo sapiens idaltu, proposed as an early subspecies of anatomically modern humans.

#1474

Patricia K. Kuhl

#16515

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition. Kuhl currently serves as an associate editor for the journals Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science.

#1475

Drew Pardoll

#43702

Overall Influence

Andrew Mark Pardoll is Director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and Abeloff Professor of Oncology, Medicine, Pathology and Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine. He is also Director of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

#1476

John Novembre

#27761

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

John Peter Novembre is a computational biologist at the University of Chicago. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015. Novembre has developed data visualization and analysis techniques to investigate correlations between genomic diversity, geography, and demographic structure.

#1477

Jyotsna Dhawan

#24991

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Jyotsna Dhawan is an Indian Cell and Developmental Biologist, Emeritus Scientist at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology and Visiting Professor, Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine . Dhawan's research has focused on adult stem cell function and skeletal muscle regeneration. Dhawan is the current President of the Indian Society for Cell Biology and the Indian Society of Developmental Biologists . Dhawan was elected as a fellow to the Indian National Science Academy in 2019.

#1478

Vladimir Torchilin

#30766

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Vladimir Petrovich Torchilin is a Soviet, Russian and American biochemist, pharmacologist , and an expert in medical nanotechnology. Torchillin is a University Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Northeastern University. He also serves as a director at both the Center for Translational Cancer Nanomedicine and at the Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Nanomedicine at Northeastern University.

#1479

Carl Folke

#36932

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Carl Folke , is a trans-disciplinary environmental scientist and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is a specialist in economics, resilience, and social-ecological systems, viewing such systems as intertwined and potentially unexpected in their interactions. As a framework for resource management, this perspective brings important insights to environmental management, urban planning, and climate adaptation. He suggests ways to improve our ability to understand complex social-ecological interactions, deal with change, and build resilience, often working at smaller scales as...

#1480

Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin

#8257

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Murray Bookchin was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment , Post-Scarcity Anarchism , The Ecology of Freedom , and Urbanization Without Cities . In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted w...

#1481

Gökhan S. Hotamisligil

#17420

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Gökhan S. Hotamisligil is a Turkish-American physician scientist; James Stevens Simmons Chair of Genetics and Metabolism at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health ; Director of the Sabri Ülker Center for Metabolic Research and associate member of Harvard-MIT Broad Institute, Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Joslin Diabetes Center.

#1482

Alan Evans

#42034

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Alan Charles Evans PhD FRSC FCAHS is a Welsh-born Canadian neuroscientist who is a James McGill Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Biomedical Engineering, and holds the Victor Dahdaleh Chair in Neurosciences at McGill University. He is also a researcher at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute, Co-Director of the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health, Director of the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Scientific Director of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform, Scientific Director of McGill's Healthy Brains, He...

#1483

Mark M. Davis

#38189

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mark Morris Davis is an American immunologist. He is the director of and Avery Family Professor of Immunology at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection at Stanford University. Education Davis was educated at Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology where he was awarded a PhD in 1981 for research supervised by Leroy E. Hood.

#1484

Roger Nicoll

#32717

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Roger A. Nicoll is an American neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco where he is professor at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology. Nicoll grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. He studied biology and chemistry at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin before he shifted to medical studies at University of Rochester School of Medicine where he obtained a M.D in 1968. In between he studied electrophysiology for one year at National Institutes of Health where he later returned to work as a researcher. Subsequently, he got a position with the State Universi...

#1485

David Talmage

#29002

Overall Influence

1919 - 2014 (95 years)

David Wilson Talmage was an American immunologist. He made significant contributions to the clonal selection theory. Career Talmage was born to American Presbyterian missionaries in Japanese-controlled Korea. He was educated by home school and mission school until attending a boarding school in Pyongyang for secondary education. Talmage received his BS from Davidson College in 1941 and his MD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1944. From 1952 to 1959 he was associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. From 1959 he was professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, professor of microbiology from 1960 to 1986, and distinguished professor starting in 1986.

#1486

Donald F. Steiner

#27686

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Donald Frederick Steiner was an American biochemist and a professor at the University of Chicago. Birth and education Donald F. Steiner was born in 1930 in Lima, Ohio. He completed his B.S. in Chemistry and Zoology from the University of Cincinnati in 1952. He completed his M.S. in biochemistry and his M.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956. He then completed his medical and research training – with an internship at King County Hospital and residency/post-doctoral research at the University of Washington – before returning to the University of Chicago as a faculty member in 1960.

#1487

William McGinnis

#35128

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

William McGinnis, Ph.D. is a molecular biologist and professor of biology at the University of California San Diego. At UC San Diego he has also served as the Chairman of the Department of Biology from July 1998 - June 1999, as Associate Dean of the Division of Natural Sciences from July 1, 1999 - June 2000, and as Interim Dean of the newly established Division of Biological Sciences from July 1, 2000 - February 1, 2001. Dr. McGinnis was appointed Dean of the Divisional Biological Sciences on July 1, 2013.

#1488

Harald von Boehmer

#43623

Overall Influence

1942 - 2018 (76 years)

Harald von Boehmer was a German-Swiss immunologist best known for his work on T cells. Career The youngest of Hasso von Boehmer's three children, von Boehmer obtained an M.D. from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a Ph.D. from Melbourne University, Australia . He was a member of the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland , director of Unité INSERM 373 at the René Descartes University in Paris, France and is Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, Cambridge and Chief of the Laboratory for Lymphocyte Biology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

#1489

Verne Grant

#43197

Overall Influence

1917 - 2007 (90 years)

Verne Edwin Grant was an American botanist and writer. Grant was born in San Francisco, California. In 1940 he received his BA in Botany and in 1949 his PhD in Botany and Genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was the Professor of Botany for the University of Texas at Austin from 1970 to 1987.

#1490

Arthur Lander

#27218

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Arthur D. Lander an American biologist who is Director of the Center for Complex Biological Systems at the University of California, Irvine. Education He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and is an alumnus of John Dewey High School there. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and a combined M.D., Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, under the direction of Louis Reichardt. His first faculty position was jointly in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He moved as Professor to Irvine...

#1491

Gordon Dougan

#34291

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Gordon Dougan is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge and head of pathogen research and a member of the board of management at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. During his career, Dougan has pioneered work on enteric diseases and been heavily involved in the movement to improve vaccine usage in developing countries. In this regard he was recently voted as one of the top ten most influential people in the vaccine world by people working in the area.

#1492

Wolfram Saenger

#29527

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Wolfram Saenger is a German biochemist and protein crystallographer. In his research career spanning over 30 years he has worked at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine, Harvard University and the Free University of Berlin, where he led the Institute for Crystallography research until his retirement in 2011. A recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honor awarded for achievements in research in Germany, and the Humboldt Prize , he is best known for his research on X-ray crystallography of membrane proteins and protein-nucleic acid complexes.

#1493

Andrej Šali

#30233

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Andrej Šali is a computational structural biologist. Since 2003, he has been Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. He also serves as an editor of the journal Structure.

#1494

Suzanne Pfeffer

#33990

Overall Influence

Suzanne Ruth Pfeffer is an American neuroscientist who is a professor at Stanford University. Her research investigates the molecular mechanisms that cause receptors to be transported between membrane compartments in cells, and she is an expert in Rab GTPases and the molecular basis of inherited Parkinson's disease. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Society for Cell Biology.

#1495

Kenneth Murray

#20824

Overall Influence

1930 - 2013 (83 years)

Sir Kenneth "Ken" Murray FRS FRSE FRCPath was a British molecular biologist and the Biogen Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Edinburgh. An important early figure in genetic engineering, Murray cofounded Biogen. There, he and his team developed one of the first vaccines against hepatitis B. Along with his wife, biologist Lady Noreen , Murray also founded the Darwin Trust of Edinburgh, a charity supporting young biologists in their doctoral studies.

#1496

Rüdiger Wittig

#36537

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Rüdiger Wittig is a professor of geobotany and ecology at the Goethe University Frankfurt in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Career From 1968 to 1973, Wittig studied biology and chemistry at the Wilhelms-University of Westphalia in Münster and passed the state examination, followed by doctoral studies from 1973 to 1976 . Until the completion of his postdoctoral lecture qualification in 1980, he was a research associate at the Wilhelms-University in Münster. From 1980 until 1988, Wittig was professor for botany at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf and chair of the department for geobotany at the Institute for Plant Physiology.

#1497

Michael Grunstein

Michael Grunstein

#26938

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Michael Grunstein is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The only surviving child of Holocaust survivors, he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree from McGill University in Montreal, and his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He did his post-doctoral training at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he invented the colony hybridization screening technique for recombinant DNAs in David Hogness' laboratory.

#1498

Adrian Horridge

Adrian Horridge

#34156

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Adrian Horridge FRS FAA is an Australian neurobiologist and professor at Australian National University. Life Horridge was born in Sheffield, England, to George William Horridge and Olive , daughter of Albert Stray, who owned a chain of sweetshops. The Horridge family had operated a business in Sheffield- William Horridge and Company, "Stag, Buck, Horn, Wood and Buffalo Handles, and Scale Cutters"- since 1750, producing amongst other things ivory scales for piano keys, combs, and knife handles. His paternal grandfather was the last to be involved with the company, which was sold in 1921 for...

#1499

Mikael Fortelius

Mikael Fortelius

#42333

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mikael Fortelius is a professor of evolutionary palaeontology at the University of Helsinki and the coordinator of the Neogene of the Old World database of fossil mammals. His research involves the evolution of Eurasian land mammals and terrestrial environments during the Neogene, ecomorphology of ungulates, developmental biology, the function and evolution of mammalian teeth, and scaling problems . He is an expert on indricotheres. He has authored and co-authored a number of papers in peer-reviewed international journals as well as articles on popular science and other published material. ...

#1500

Ernest McCulloch

#17985

Overall Influence

1926 - 2011 (85 years)

Ernest Armstrong McCulloch was a University of Toronto cellular biologist, best known for demonstrating – with James Till – the existence of stem cells. Biography McCulloch was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on 27 April 1926, and was educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto.

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