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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#14801

Beverley Clarkson

#177737

Overall Influence

Beverley Rae Clarkson is a New Zealand botanist, ecologist and wetland researcher and conservationist. She is best known for her research into and her conservation work with New Zealand wetlands. In 2021, the city of Hamilton awarded her the Hamilton-Kirikiroa Medal. In the same year Clarkson was awarded the New Zealand conservation award, the Loder Cup.

#14802

Jayne S. Danska

#177950

Overall Influence

Jayne S. Danska is an immunologist in Canada. Danska is a Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, a Professor at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine, and the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Molecular Medicine.

#14803

Kuulo Kalamees

#173855

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Kuulo Kalamees is an Estonian mycologist. Since 1959, he has taught at the University of Tartu and the Estonian University of Life Sciences; since 1997 Emeritus Professor. He has described several genera, e.g. Tricholomella.

#14804

Amparo Acker-Palmer

#168355

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Amparo Acker-Palmer is a German-based Spanish cell biologist and neuroscientist. Her research focuses on the similarities of the mechanism of nerve and blood vessel development. She has worked alongside her husband, Till Acker, who is a neurobiologist, in researching tumor therapies. In her career, she has won several awards, including the Paul Ehrlich & Ludwig Darmstaeder Prize for Young Researchers in 2010. In 2012, Amparo Acker-Palmer was elected as member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

#14805

Eric Guilyardi

#177977

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Eric Guilyardi is a climate scientist, professor in the department of meteorology at the University of Reading and directeur de recherche CNRS at LOCEAN at Institute Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris, France. He is an expert of the El Niño phenomenon. He has been a Lead Author for the IPCC AR5 report.

#14806

Heribert Reitböck

#102256

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Heribert J. P. Reitböck was an Austrian neuroscientist and professor at Philipps-University Marburg. Reitböck was appointed University Professor at Philipps-University Marburg in 1978 as successor of Hans Wolter. He established the Biophysics / Neurophysics research group there, and perfected a multi-micro-electrode recording technique he had developed in a collaboration between the Westinghouse Electric Research Laboratories and the University of Pittsburgh. With that technique, object-related synchronizations in the visual system were discovered in 1989. Based on that principle he develope...

#14807

Hermann Wagner

#177986

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

#14808

Lindsay M. De Biase

#172794

Overall Influence

Lindsay M. De Biase is an American neuroscientist and glial biologist as well as an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. De Biase explores the diversity of microglia that exist within the basal ganglia circuitry to one day target regional or circuit-specific microglia in disease. De Biase's graduate work highlighted the existence and roles of neuron-OPC synapses in development and her postdoctoral work was critical in showing that microglia are not homogenous within the brain parenchyma.

#14809

Jonah Ratsimbazafy

#141476

Overall Influence

Jonah Ratsimbazafy is a Malagasy primatologist. In 2020, he was appointed President of the International Primatological Society. Life and research Ratsimbazafy received his PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Physical Anthropology in 2002, and afterwards became Training and Conservation Coordinator for Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Madagascar. He has published over 170 papers and supervised over 65 students, including 20 PhD students. His main field of study is lemur ecology and conservation.

#14810

Michelle LaRue

#176441

Overall Influence

Michelle La Rue is a conservation biologist and ecologist based at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her research focuses on using satellite imagery to understand polar animals, including emperor penguins and crabeater seals. She has visited Antarctica at least six times.

#14811

Lowell N. Lewis

#171732

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Lowell N. Lewis was an American plant physiology professor. He began teaching plant physiology at University of California, Riverside in 1960. In 1963 he and graduate student Rashad Khalifah discovered a new kind of auxin present in citrus plants. He was promoted to associate professor of horticultural science in 1965. In 1971 he was appointed associate dean of the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences by the dean, W. Mack Dugger. He left teaching in 1981 when he was appointed vice president of the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. In February 1989, he became director of biotechnology company Ecogen Inc.

#14812

Kevin Murphy

#178066

Overall Influence

#14813

Joan Kleypas

#177159

Overall Influence

Joan Ann Kleypas is a marine scientist known for her work on the impact of ocean acidification and climate change on coral reefs, and for advancing solutions to environmental problems caused by climate change.

#14814

Erminio Costa

#178072

Overall Influence

#14815

Tsutomu Suzuki

#178074

Overall Influence

#14816

Beth Orcutt

#149335

Overall Influence

Beth N. Orcutt is an American oceanographer whose research focuses on the microbial life of the ocean floor. As of 2012, she is a senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. She is also a senior scientist of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations, a Science and Technology Center funded by the National Science Foundation and headquartered at the University of Southern California and part of the Deep Carbon Observatory Deep Life Community. Orcutt has made fundamental contributions to the study of life below the seafloor, particularly in oceanic crust and ...

#14817

Sue T. Griffin

#137715

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Wilma Sue Tilton Griffin is an American neuroscientist best known for her contributions regarding the role of neuroinflammation in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. She conceived a "cytokine cycle" by which interleukin 1 and other paracrine factors conspire with one another to create a "feed-forward" cooperativity, thus establishing the premise for a progressive disease. Griffin is the Alexa and William T. Dillard Professor in Geriatric Research and director of research at the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

#14818

Markus Ribbe

#121638

Overall Influence

Markus W. Ribbe is an American microbiologist and biochemist, focusing in chemical biology and inorganic and organometallic, currently at University of California, Irvine, also holding the Chancellor's Professorship, and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Academy of Microbiology.

#14819

David M. Sever

#177652

Overall Influence

David M. Sever is an American herpetologist, histologist, anatomist and reproductive biologist. He has been a professor and department head in the Department of Biological Sciences at Southeastern Louisiana University since 2004, and held the Kenneth Dyson Endowed Professorship in Biological Sciences from 2012 to 2015. He is well known for over 30 years of research on the secondary sexual characteristics of salamanders and more generally on comparative histoanatomy of the urogenital systems of vertebrates. and was recognized as the 2013 Distinguished Herpetologist of the Year by the Herpetolo...

#14820

Sujata Tewari

#159933

Overall Influence

1938 - 2000 (62 years)

Sujata Tewari was an Indian-American neuroscientist known for her work with Ernest Noble that demonstrated that chronic alcohol consumption inhibits protein metabolism in the brains of mice. Early life and education Tewari was born and raised in Murshidabad, West Bengal, and began her higher education in India. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Agra University, graduating in 1955, and a master's degree in biochemistry from Lucknow University in 1957. She received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from McGill University in 1962 and a Psy.D. from the American Behavioral Studies Institute in ...

#14821

Malegapuru William Makgoba

Malegapuru William Makgoba

#132975

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Malegapuru William Makgoba is a leading South African immunologist, physician, public health advocate, academic and former vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In 2013 he was recognised as "a pioneer in higher education transformation", by being awarded the Order of Mapungubwe in Silver, but has also generated extensive controversy during that process. He is also responsible for the unjust and unfair dismissal of several high profile academics from UDW and was accused of sexual harassment from his direct staff.

#14822

Paul-Émile Pilet

#154838

Overall Influence

1927 - 2005 (78 years)

Paul-Émile Pilet, , was a Swiss biologist, professor and director of the Institute of Plant Biology and Physiology of the University of Lausanne. Biography Son of William, architect, Paul-Émile Pilet studied physics and biology at the University of Lausanne, where he obtained a doctorate in science in 1951. After internships at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris and Bordeaux, at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and at Bedford College , he returned to the country to pursue an academic career at the University of Lausanne: privat-docent from 1952, lecturer , extraordinary professor , then full professor from 1967 to 1992.

#14823

Hans Ferdinand Linskens

#178169

Overall Influence

1921 - 2007 (86 years)

Hans Ferdinand Linskens was a German botanist and geneticist. Linskens was born in Lahr, Germany. From 1957 to 1986, he was professor of botany at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Linskens was the editor-in-chief of Theoretical and Applied Genetics and Sexual Plant Reproduction. He was also an influential editor of handbooks.

#14824

Charles G. Gross

#146497

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Charles Gordon Gross was an American professor of psychology and a neuroscientist who studied the sensory processing and pattern recognition in the cerebral cortex of macaque monkeys. He spent 43 years of his career at Princeton University. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received his A.B. in 1957 from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Afterward, he went on to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he conducted pioneering research on the visual cortex of monkeys. Gross made many important discoveries in his career, including th...

#14825

Mark Y Stoeckle

#178172

Overall Influence

#14826

Sarah Fidler

#168222

Overall Influence

Sarah Fidler is an immunologist, researcher and professor in HIV Medicine at Imperial College London and consultant physician in HIV for St Mary's Hospital, London. Her clinical work involves looking after people who have just been infected with the human immunodeficiency virus , and testing new approaches towards curing HIV.

#14827

Seiji Ozawa

#178185

Overall Influence

#14828

Rijk Gispen

#171039

Overall Influence

1910 - 2000 (90 years)

Rijk Gispen , was a Dutch virologist and former Director of the National Institute of Public Health in the Netherlands. He is well known for his research in immunology and the study of Orthopoxviruses.

#14829

Keith Matthews

#177687

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Keith Roland Matthews, , , is a British cell biologist and parasitologist, currently Professor of Parasite Biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on African trypanosomes , which cause human sleeping sickness and the equivalent cattle disease nagana.

#14830

Michael H. Stone

#178199

Overall Influence

#14831

Marianne Nyegaard

#154068

Overall Influence

Marianne Nyegaard is a Danish marine biologist who specializes in the study of ocean sunfish. She is known for identifying the ocean sunfish species Mola tecta. Career As a PhD student at Murdoch University in Australia, Nyegaard lead a team of researchers in analyzing ocean sunfish DNA. While analyzing skin samples in 2013, she identified an undocumented species. She spent the next four years working with other researchers to identify and describe Mola tecta, or the hoodwinker sunfish, in 2017. Nyegaard has continued to help identify specimens of M. tecta in New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Sou...

#14832

William Doe

#117684

Overall Influence

1941 - 2022 (81 years)

William Fairbank Doe was an Australian-born gastroenterologist who was Provost of the Aga Khan University and professor of medicine and Dean of the University of Birmingham Medical School. From 1993 until 2001 he was the senior editor of the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. His scientific output includes over 150 scientific research publications in international scientific journals. Since 1999 Doe has been a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, United Kingdom. He was President of the Gastroenterological Society of Australia from 1989 until 1991.

#14833

Timothy Buie

#140258

Overall Influence

Timothy M. Buie is a pediatric gastroenterologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. Buie joined Harvard Medical School in 1998 after previously practicing at Pediatric Gastroenterology Associates for eight years. He was also the director of Gastrointestinal and Nutritional Services at MGH's Lurie Center for Autism. He is well known for his research pertaining to the possible connection between autism and gastrointestinal disorders, and has told the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee that over half of autistic children experience gastrointestinal symptoms, whereas he stated that this was the case for "between 50 and 70%" of children with autism in an interview with ABC News.

#14834

Robert Lee Gilbertson

Robert Lee Gilbertson

#172449

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Robert Lee Gilbertson was a distinguished American mycologist and educator. He was a faculty member at University of Arizona for 26 years until his retirement from teaching in 1995; he was a Professor Emeritus at U of A until his death on October 26, 2011, in Tucson, Arizona. 2011. He held concurrent positions as Plant Pathologist, Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Arizona for a project Research on wood-rotting fungi and other fungi associated with southwestern plants and was collaborator and consultant with Center for Forest Mycology Research, US Forest Service, Forest Produc...

#14835

Yvonne Chuan Fang Su

#124987

Overall Influence

Yvonne Chuan Fang Su is a Hong Kong evolutionary biologist who is notable for her co-discovery of Pseuduvaria bruneiensis and Pseuduvaria borneensis. Her doctoral work at the University of Hong Kong focused on the phylogeny of the flowering plant genus Pseuduvaria. Her work as a faculty member at Duke–NUS Medical School focuses on the evolution of viruses.

#14836

Denisa Wagner

#78268

Overall Influence

Denisa D. Wagner is an American scientist currently the Edwin Cohn Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital , Harvard Medical School. Wagner first arrived in the United States in 1975 as a refugee from Czechoslovakia. She received her PhD in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught at the University of Rochester and Tufts University before joining the Harvard faculty in 1994.The Wagner Lab contributes in the fields of vascular biology, inflammation, and thrombosis. Her Lab focuses on how blood cells and endothelial cells respond to vascular injury. Also her lab has been studying NETs for more than a decade.

#14837

Peter Matthews

#157508

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Peter Bryan Conrad Matthews was a British physiologist who made particular contributions to the study of muscle spindles. He was elected as fellow of the Royal Society in 1973. He was the Professor of Sensorimotor Physiology at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Christ Church.

#14838

Barbara J. Collins

#82016

Overall Influence

1929 - 2013 (84 years)

Barbara Jane Collins was an American writer, ecologist, geologist, botanist, and professor. She was the founder of the Barbara Collins Arboretum at the campus of California Lutheran University where she was a professor for 50 years. She was instrumental in the preservation of Wildwood Mesa and received a commendation from the Mayor of Thousand Oaks, California for her preservation efforts. At Cal Lutheran, she created a website which cataloged over 3,000 plant species and was the sole member of the Interdisciplinary Major Committee for thirty years. She was among the first faculty at both California Lutheran University and California State University, Northridge .

#14839

Alexander von Gabain

#175573

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Alexander von Gabain is a microbiologist, academic, founder of several biotech firms and board member of venture capital firms. He has worked at the intersection of the healthcare industry, academia and research throughout his career. He was one of the founding board members of EIT in 2008 and began his involvement in EIT Health in 2015.

#14840

Sidonia Făgărășan

#52642

Overall Influence

Sidonia Făgărășan is a Romanian biological scientist who is a professor at the Riken Institute in Japan. Her research considers the molecular mechanisms that underpin processes in gut microbioata and the mucosal barrier. In 2020, she was awarded the Kobayashi Foundation Award.

#14841

P. J. Snow

#168905

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Peter John Snow, Dr. is an Australian neuroscientist and author. Life Shortly after his birth in Jubbulpore, India, his father retired from the British Army and moved to Australia. In 1970 Snow graduated with First Class Honors in Zoology. He then enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Alberta, completing his dissertation in invertebrate neurobiology in 1974 before moving to the University Edinburgh, as a Canadian Medical Research Fellow. During this period he pioneered techniques for injecting single mammalian nerve cells with tracers and used these to extensively study the neuronal ...

#14842

Katie Bentley

#117897

Overall Influence

Katie Bentley is a British computer scientist who is group leader in the Cellular Adaptive Behaviour Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute and an academic at King's College London. Her research considers computational simulations of cellular interactions.

#14843

Leland Shanor

#133574

Overall Influence

1914 - 1993 (79 years)

Leland Shanor was an American mycologist and botanist. He married mycologist Mary Williams Ward Shanor on June 20, 1940, in Burgaw, North Carolina. They had two sons. Charles was born in 1946 and Paul in 1949. Outside of their studies in mycology, Leland and Mary Shanor were both heavily involved in real estate. They are both buried in Rockfish Presbyterian Church Cemetery in Wallace, Duplin County, North Carolina.

#14844

Robert Shapley

#59288

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Robert Shapley is an American neurophysiologist, the Natalie Clews Spencer Professor of the Sciences at New York University, a professor in the Center for Neural Science and an associate member of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

#14845

Mart Ustav

#176528

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Mart Ustav is an Estonian biomedical scientist. Ustav was born Cherlak, Russian SFSR to Estonian parents who had been deported by Soviet authorities. The family were permitted to return to Estonia in 1956, following the death of Joseph Stalin and the Khrushchev Thaw. He attended primary and secondary schools in Tartu and graduated from the Department of Physics and Chemistry of Tartu State University in 1972. In 1979, he defended his doctoral degree in chemistry from the board of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

#14846

Valerie Harwood

#178391

Overall Influence

#14847

Eleni Nastouli

#172667

Overall Influence

Eleni Nastouli is a Greek clinical virologist who works at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Great Ormond Street Hospital. At UCLH, Nastouli leads the Advanced Pathogen Diagnostics Unit, where she develops technologies for genome sequencing as well as studying how viruses are transmitted around hospitals. During the COVID-19 pandemic Nastouli led an investigation into infection rates amongst healthcare workers.

#14848

Cathrin Brisken

#170844

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Cathrin Brisken is a German and Swiss medical doctor, researcher, and professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . Her research focuses on the mechanisms of hormonal control in breast cancer development.

#14849

Coen Hemker

#159696

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Hendrik Coenraad "Coen" Hemker is a Dutch biochemist and academic administrator. He was one of the founders of Maastricht University and was its rector magnificus from 1982 to 1984. He was a professor of biochemistry from 1975 until 1999. In his research he has mainly studied thrombosis and hemostasis.

#14850

José Luis Castro Aguirre

#168603

Overall Influence

1943 - 2011 (68 years)

José Luis Castro Aguirre was a Mexican ichthyologist. He was a founding member of the Mexican Ichthyological Society and a member of the National System of Investigators who produced around 150 publications, focusing chiefly on the taxonomy, ecology, and biogeography of the fishes of Mexico. His 1978 book Catálogo sistemático de los peces marinos que penetran en aguas continentales de México, con aspectos zoogeográficos y ecológicos was the first catalog of estuarine fishes of Mexico. Born in Mexico City, he attended the National School of Biological Sciences at the National Polytechnic Institute earning a master's degree in 1974 and a PhD in 1986.

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