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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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#14901

Amanda Swart

#141860

Overall Influence

Amanda Cecilia Swart is a South African biochemist who holds a professorship in biochemistry at Stellenbosch University. She is known for her research on rooibos, a herbal tea popular in South Africa, has been funded by the South African Rooibos Council in her research, and is frequently quoted in South African media promoting the reported health benefits of rooibos.

#14902

Djunijanti Peggie

#175996

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Djunijanti Peggie is an entomologist who specializes in Lepidoptera of Indonesia. She is a researcher and curator for the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. Peggie is the first Indonesian to become a butterfly researcher and author of books about butterflies. She is considered to be the mother of Indonesian butterfly studies.

#14903

Bevan Buirchell

Bevan Buirchell

#176345

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Bevan John Buirchell is an Australian botanist. He graduated from The University of Western Australia and obtained his PhD in biochemistry in 1982. In 1988 he began working on lupins as an agricultural crop, first as a research officer and later as Senior Lupin Breeder in the Western Australian Department of Agriculture. He has used molecular markers, especially markers for disease resistance, in breeding programs and was part of a team that tagged 9,000 locations on the lupin genome.

#14904

Lorraine Friedman

#170364

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Lorraine Friedman was an American medical mycologist who was recruited to Tulane University to create a center for medical mycology. She was a faculty member at Tulane University from 1955-1981 where she extensively researched Tinea capitis, “Ringworm of the hair.” She was instrumental in creating the Medical Mycological Society of the Americas and served as the President in 1975.

#14905

Christina Gurnett

#171651

Overall Influence

Christina A. Gurnett is the A. Ernest and Jane G. Stein Professor of Neurology, the director of the Division of Pediatric and Developmental Neurology at Washington University in St. Louis, and the chief of Neurology at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

#14906

Irini Sereti

#118575

Overall Influence

Irini Sereti is a Greek scientist and physician. She is chief of the HIV pathogenesis section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Sereti researches immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome, idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia, and immune-based therapeutic strategies of HIV investigation.

#14907

Chien Chung-liang

#177054

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Chien Chung-liang is a Taiwanese politician. He was the Deputy Minister of Science and Technology since March 2014. Early life Chien obtained his bachelor's degree in zoology in 1984 and master's degree in anatomy in 1989 from National Taiwan University . He then obtained his doctoral degree in pathology from Columbia University in the United States in 1995.

#14908

Anna Molofsky

#172595

Overall Influence

Anna V. Molofsky is an American psychiatrist and glial biologist. She is an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at UC San Francisco. Her lab currently studies the communication between astrocytes, microglia, and neurons to understand how these signals regulate synaptic development in health and disease.

#14909

Geoffrey G Parker

#179076

Overall Influence

#14910

Jordan Smoller

#169024

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Jordan Wassertheil Smoller is an American psychiatric geneticist. He is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He also serves as Trustees Endowed Chair in Psychiatric Neuroscience and Director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. His other positions include being an associate member of the Broad Institute, vice president of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, and co-chair of the Cross Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium.

#14911

Carrie L. Partch

#169221

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Carrie L. Partch is an American protein biochemist and circadian biologist. Partch is currently a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is noted for her work using biochemical and biophysical techniques to study the mechanisms of circadian rhythmicity across multiple organisms. Partch applies principles of chemistry and physics to further her research in the field of biological clocks.

#14912

Deng Zongjue

#171883

Overall Influence

1916 - 2019 (103 years)

Deng Zongjue was a Chinese biologist and a professor at Nanchang University. He was the only tenured professor in Jiangxi province. Biography Deng Zongjue was born on 7 April 1916 in Rudong County, Jiangsu, Republic of China. He graduated from the Department of Biology of National Central University in 1938, and taught as an assistant professor and lecturer at the university from 1938 to 1949.

#14913

Rebecca Katz

#65744

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Rebecca Katz is a professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center. She is an expert in global health and international diplomacy, specializing in emerging infectious diseases. From 2004 to 2019, she was a consultant for the United States Department of State on matters related to the Biological Weapons Convention and emerging infectious disease threats. Katz served on the Joe Biden presidential campaign's public health panel to advise on the COVID-19 pandemic.

#14914

Fiona Cross

#154069

Overall Influence

Fiona Ruth Cross is a New Zealand arachnologist. She did both her MSc and PhD theses at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Cross is best known for detecting food preference in East African Evarcha culicivora spiders for female Anopheles mosquitos fed recently on mammalian blood.

#14915

Luanne Metz

#149662

Overall Influence

Luanne Metz is a Canadian politician and clinical neurologist and researcher. She was elected member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for Calgary-Varsity in the 2023 Alberta general election. She is known for her work in the field of multiple sclerosis and has been recognized globally as an expert in the field.

#14916

Meera Chand

#137147

Overall Influence

Meera A. Chand is a British microbiologist, working at Public Health England and as a consultant with the Department of Infectious Diseases, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. She is also a clinical research fellow into severe acute respiratory infections at Imperial College London.

#14917

Edward R. Hauser

Edward R. Hauser

#166625

Overall Influence

1916 - 2014 (98 years)

Edward R. Hauser was an American animal scientist who served as professor and chairman of the Department of Meat and Animal Science at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Birth and education Edward R. Hauser was born on August 29, 1916, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. One of four children of Swiss immigrant parents from Wiedlisbach, Canton Bern, Switzerland, he left the family dairy to study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he received the BS in Animal Husbandry in 1938. He was a letterman on the 1936 wrestling team. He obtained the MS degree in Animal Science at Oklahoma A&M University in 1939 where he studied reproductive performance of sheep.

#14918

Kenji Ikeda

#179249

Overall Influence

#14919

Beyene Petros

#140901

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Beyene Petros is an Ethiopian politician and educator who was the professor of Biology at Addis Ababa University and a former member of the Ethiopian House of People's Representatives, representing an electoral district in Badawacho of Hadiya Zone. He is currently the chairman of one of the largest opposition political parties in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Federal Democratic Forum Medrek.

#14920

L. Walter Macior

L. Walter Macior

#179255

Overall Influence

1926 - 2007 (81 years)

Lazarus Walter Macior was an American botanist. He was professor emeritus and Distinguished Professor in Biology at the University of Akron. Life Walter Aloysius Macior Jr. was the son of Walter Aloysius Macior and Alice Mary Macior. He graduated from Columbia University, and from the University of Wisconsin.

#14921

Sarah Rugheimer

#125542

Overall Influence

Sarah Rugheimer is a Swiss-American astrobiologist and astrophysicist at Jesus College, Oxford. Her research focuses on the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, and ways of detecting life. Education Rugheimer earned her bachelor's degree in physics at the University of Calgary. She completed her master's degree and PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Harvard University. Her thesis topic involved studying biomarkers and modelling the atmosphere of exoplanets, using space-based telescopes.

#14922

Matthew David Barrett

#84483

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Matthew David Barrett is a West Australian botanist. He has published some 70 botanical names. See also Taxa named by Matthew David Barrett. He worked at Kings Park and Botanic Garden and is currently employed by the University of Western Australia.

#14923

Owen Martin Phillips

#77496

Overall Influence

1930 - 2010 (80 years)

Owen Martin Phillips was a U.S. physical oceanographer and geophysicist who spent most of his career at the Johns Hopkins University. Early life Owen Phillips was born at Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia a suburb of Sydney, the son of Richard Keith and Madeline Constance Phillips. His father fought in the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I. In 1936 the family moved to the country town of Tamworth where most of his primary education occurred.

#14924

Ann Elizabeth Sefton

#177743

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Ann Elizabeth Jervie Sefton AO is an Australian neurologist and educator. As a visual scientist, she developed descriptions of the connections between the eye and visual centres of the brain. As a student at the University of Sydney she was the first woman to be elected President of the Medical Society. In 2000, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for her services to medical education. She was appointed Pro-Chancellor of the University of Sydney in 2001 and served as Deputy Chancellor from 2004 to 2008.

#14925

Ute Müller-Doblies

#174726

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Ute Müller-Doblies is a German botanist with an interest in the systematics of Amaryllidaceae. She is currently at the Herbarium of the Technische Universität Berlin in collaboration with Dietrich Müller-Doblies .

#14926

Catherina Becker

#171913

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Catherina Gwynne Becker is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at TU Dresden, and was formerly Professor of Neural Development and Regeneration at the University of Edinburgh. Early life and education Catherina Becker was born in Marburg, Germany in 1964. She was educated at the in Bremen, before going on to study at the University of Bremen where she obtained an MSci of Biology and her PhD in 1993, investigating visual system development and regeneration in frogs and salamanders under the supervision of Gerhard Roth. She then trained as post-doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Tech...

#14927

Li Bo

#170966

Overall Influence

1929 - 1998 (69 years)

Li Bo was a Chinese phytoecologist, professor at Inner Mongolia University, and member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. With cooperation from Beijing University, Li was in charge of a state project named "The Application of Remote Sensing Technology to the Investigation of Pasture Resources in Inner Mongolia", which made contributions to the utilization and protection of grasslands.

#14928

Geeta Narlikar

#135609

Overall Influence

Geeta J. Narlikar is an Indian–American biochemist who is Professor and the Lewis and Ruth Cozen Chair at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research considers epigenetic regulation and genome organisation. She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

#14929

Susannah M. Porter

#144187

Overall Influence

Susannah M. Porter is an American paleontologist and geobiologist who studies the early evolution of eukaryotes, the early Cambrian fossil record of animals, and the evolution of skeletal biomineralization. She is currently a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Porter is a Fellow of the Paleontological Society. She has received national recognition awards from the Geological Society of America.

#14930

Catherine S. Woolley

#172149

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Catherine S. Woolley is an American neuroendocrinologist. Woolley holds the William Deering Chair in Biological Sciences in the Department of Neurobiology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, at Northwestern University. She is also a member of the Women's Health Research Institute in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.

#14931

Richard E. Tracy

#102231

Overall Influence

Richard E. Tracy is an American forensic pathologist and professor emeritus. His research activities have concentrated on atherosclerosis and hypertension. Education Tracy is a pathologist in the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. He was a graduate in B.A. from the University of Chicago. After his graduation, he joined as freshman-junior years in medical school . During these years he started his research on pathology and acted as USPHS Fellowship Trainee in Pathology. He got his M.D. and Ph.D. in 1961 from the University of Chicago.

#14932

Leonid Moroz

#117434

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Leonid L. Moroz is a Russian-American neuroscientist, focusing in neuroscience, comparative & evolutionary neurobiology, genomics and epigenomics, learning and memory and working in characterize basic mechanisms underlying the design of nervous systems and parallel evolution of neural circuits, neuronal signaling mechanisms and brains, currently the Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience, Genetics, Biology and Chemistry at University of Florida.

#14933

E. T. York

#105855

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

E. Travis York, Jr. was an American agronomist, professor, university administrator, agricultural extension administrator, and U.S. presidential adviser. York was a native of Alabama, and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in agricultural sciences. He served as the director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service, the administrator of the federal Extension Service, the interim president of the University of Florida, and the chancellor of the State University System of Florida.

#14934

Javed Iqbal Kazi

#55255

Overall Influence

1955 - 2014 (59 years)

Javed Iqbal Kazi was a Pakistani pathologist specialized in renal pathology, professor and chairman of Histopathology at Karachi Medical and Dental College, Sindh Institute of Urology & Transplantation, Dr. Ziauddin Hospitals & National Institute of Blood Diseases, and served as Dean of medicine of University of Karachi. He was also the board member of Journal of Pakistan Medical Association since 2005. He established the department of Histopathology at Sindh Institute of Urology & Transplantation, Karachi, in 1995 and is the pioneer of Renal and Transplant Pathology in Pakistan.

#14935

Suzanne Duigan

#174010

Overall Influence

1924 - 1993 (69 years)

Suzanne Lawless Duigan was an Australian paleobotanist who specialised in fossil pollen . She collaborated with fellow botanist Isabel Cookson extensively on Paleogene brown coal deposits in Victoria. She pioneered studies in south east Australian coal measures as she considered micro- and macrofossils of the region in terms of their relationships to living plant species and families and their ecologies.

#14936

Masayuki Yamamoto

#179381

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

#14937

Appolinaire Djikeng

#92274

Overall Influence

Appolinaire Djikeng is a Cameroonian biologist and Professor and Chair for Tropical Agriculture and Sustainable Development and Director of the Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health at the University of Edinburgh. He was awarded the 2020 UNESCO Center for Peace Nelson Mandela Justice award in recognition of his international peace work.

#14938

Sarah E. Gergel

#177653

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Sarah E. Gergel is an American ecologist and professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia , Canada. She is a landscape ecologist, known for her research linking landscapes and rivers, and her role in enhancing training in the practice of landscape ecology.

#14939

Marta Tufet

#79270

Overall Influence

Marta Tufet Bayona is a British and Spanish biologist and public health resource coordinator with a specialty in malaria. She is executive director of the UK Collaborative on Development Research. Early life and education Tufet is from the United Kingdom. She is half Ecuadorian.

#14940

Darlene R. Ketten

#165347

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Darlene R. Ketten is an American Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is best known for her work on marine mammal science, the biomechanics of hearing, and hearing loss.

#14941

Shinichi Nakagawa

#179397

Overall Influence

#14942

Alexander Hoffmann

#178095

Overall Influence

Alexander Hoffmann is a German-American biologist. He is the director of the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences and the Thomas M Asher Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles . His research interest is the development of a predictive understanding of how cellular and molecular networks regulate immune responses.

#14943

Helen Marshall

#105816

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Helen Siobhan Marshall is an Australian medical researcher who is Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Adelaide. She was named the South Australian of the Year for 2022. Early life and education Marshall's mother was a nurse and her father a general practitioner. She completed her schooling at Pembroke School, Adelaide in 1979.

#14944

Martin Högbom

#161831

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Martin Ivar Högbom is a Swedish biochemist and structural biologist. He was appointed professor of structural biochemistry at Stockholm University in 2013 and worked as visiting professor at Stanford University during 2016 and 2018.

#14945

Dora Biro

#173634

Overall Influence

Dora Biro is a behavioral biologist and the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor, Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She was previously a Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Oxford. and a visiting professor in the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan. Biro studies social behavior, problem solving, and learning in birds and primates.

#14946

Martin I. Simpson

#142345

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Martin I. Simpson is a British palaeontologist, a geologist best known for his work in the Whitby area. He lives on the Isle of Wight and runs Island Gems at Isle of Wight pearl. Though perhaps best known for his appearances in the British news media, he is also an established expert on Cretaceous fossil crustaceans and has produced important papers on the Cretaceous Lower Greensand Group. His proposal that the five units of the Atherfield Clay Formation be formally recognised as local members has been widely adopted. He has produced a popular book on fossil hunting, titled Fossil Hunting on ...

#14947

Allan Ronald

#106437

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Allan R. Ronald is a Canadian doctor and microbiologist. He has been instrumental in the investigation into sexually transmitted infections in Africa, particularly in the fields of HIV/AIDS. Ronald is the recipient of multiple awards and honours.

#14948

Camilla Speller

Camilla Speller

#120592

Overall Influence

Camilla F. Speller is a biomolecular archaeologist, Assistant Professor in Anthropological Archaeology at the University of British Columbia Department of Anthropology. Education Speller obtained her BA from the University of Calgary with a double major in archaeology and biological anthropology. She completed her MA at Simon Fraser University in 2005, using aDNA analysis to examine the distribution of salmon species at the Northwest Plateau site of Keatley Creek in British Columbia Canada. She completed her PhD, completed at Simon Fraser in 2009 with a dissertation that applied ancient DNA te...

#14949

Anthony Gill

#110553

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Anthony J Gill is an Australian pathologist, professor of surgical pathology at the University of Sydney and the chairman of the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative - part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium. Most of his research is focused on translating the improved understanding of cancer gained at the basic science level into clinically useful diagnostic tests which can be applied in the routine surgical pathology laboratory.

#14950

Gladys Elizabeth Baker

#101716

Overall Influence

1908 - 2007 (99 years)

Gladys Elizabeth Baker was an American mycologist, teacher, and botanical illustrator, known for her extensive work in biological and mycological education, and the morphological study of myxomycete fructifications . She further contributed studies to the Island Ecosystems Integrated Research Program of the U. S. International Biological Program .

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