The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#151
Bruce McEwen
#5954
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Bruce Sherman McEwen was an American neuroendocrinologist and head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University. He was known for his work on the effects of environmental and psychological stress, having coined the term allostatic load.
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Karl J. Friston
#3793
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired statistical methods to model neuroimaging data and other random dynamical systems. Friston is a key architect of the free energy principle and active inference. In imaging neuroscience he is best known for statistical parametric mapping and dynamic causal modelling. In October 2022, he joined VERSES Inc, a California-based cognitive computing company focusing on artificial intelli...
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John Ostrom
#3977
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
John Harold Ostrom was an American paleontologist who revolutionized the modern understanding of dinosaurs. Ostrom's work inspired what his pupil Robert T. Bakker has termed a "dinosaur renaissance".
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John O'Keefe
#1717
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John O'Keefe, is an American-British neuroscientist, psychologist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser; he has received several other awards. He has worked at University College London for his entire career, but a...
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Arvid Carlsson
#1371
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Arvid Carlsson was a Swedish neuropharmacologist who is best known for his work with the neurotransmitter dopamine and its effects in Parkinson's disease. For his work on dopamine, Carlsson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, together with Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard.
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Mary Higby Schweitzer
#4105
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mary Higby Schweitzer is an American paleontologist at North Carolina State University, who led the groups that discovered the remains of blood cells in dinosaur fossils and later discovered soft tissue remains in the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen MOR 1125, as well as evidence that the specimen was a pregnant female when she died.
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John Eccles
#1569
Overall Influence
1903 - 1997 (94 years)
Sir John Carew Eccles was an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. He shared the prize with Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin.
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Jules A. Hoffmann
#3121
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jules Alphonse Nicolas Hoffmann is a Luxembourg-born French biologist. During his youth, growing up in Luxembourg, he developed a strong interest in insects under the influence of his father, Jos Hoffmann. This eventually resulted in the younger Hoffmann's dedication to the field of biology using insects as model organisms. He currently holds a faculty position at the University of Strasbourg. He is a research director and member of the board of administrators of the National Center of Scientific Research in Strasbourg, France. He was elected to the positions of Vice-President and President of the French Academy of Sciences.
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Charles Brenton Huggins
#2959
Overall Influence
1901 - 1997 (96 years)
Charles Brenton Huggins was a Canadian-American physician, physiologist and cancer researcher at the University of Chicago specializing in prostate cancer. He was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering in 1941 that hormones could be used to control the spread of some cancers. This was the first discovery that showed that cancer could be controlled by chemicals.
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Lubert Stryer
#4503
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lubert Stryer is the Emeritus Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research over more than four decades has been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Science from President Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high density microarrays for genetic analysis, and authoring the standard undergraduate biochemistry textbook, Biochemistry. It is now in its ninth edition and also edited by Jeremy Berg, John L.
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George Wald
#2074
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
George Wald was an American scientist and activist who studied pigments in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit.
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Gunther von Hagens
#1893
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Gunther von Hagens is a German anatomist, businessman and lecturer. He developed the technique for preserving biological tissue specimens called plastination. Von Hagens has organized numerous Body Worlds public exhibitions and occasional live demonstrations of his and his colleagues' work, and has traveled worldwide to promote its educational value. The sourcing of biological specimens for and the commercial background of his exhibits has been controversial.
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Michael Behe
#1664
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michael Joseph Behe is an American biochemist and an advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design . He serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Behe advocates for the validity of the argument for irreducible complexity , which claims that some biochemical structures are too complex to be explained by known evolutionary mechanisms and are therefore probably the result of intelligent design. Behe has testified in several court cases related to intelligent design, including the court case Kitzmiller v.
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Matthias Mann
#5346
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Matthias Mann is a scientist in the area of mass spectrometry and proteomics. Early life and education Born in Germany he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 at Yale University where he worked in the group of John Fenn, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Hamilton O. Smith
#1745
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology Hamilton Smith, M. D., is a microbiologist, distinguished professor and scientific director of Synthetic Biology & Bioenergy at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in San Diego, California. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952 and a M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1956. He interned at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis and completed a Medical Residency at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. From 1962 to 1967 he did a fellowship in the Human Genetics department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. F...
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Pierre Chambon
#5254
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Pierre Chambon was the founder of the in Strasbourg, France. He was one of the leading molecular biologists who utilized gene cloning and sequencing technology to first decipher the structure of eukaryotic genes and their modes of regulation. His major contributions to science include the identification of RNA polymerase II , the identification of transcriptional control elements, the cloning and dissection of nuclear hormone receptors, revealing their structure and showing how they contribute to human physiology. His group was also one of the first to demonstrate, biochemically and electron-microscopically, that the nucleosome is the smallest unit of chromatin .
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Alexander Rich
#2994
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Alexander Rich was an American biologist and biophysicist. He was the William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Rich earned an A.B. and an M.D. from Harvard University. He was a post-doc of Linus Pauling. During this time he was a member of the RNA Tie Club, a social and discussion group which attacked the question of how DNA encodes proteins. He had over 600 publications to his name.
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Osamu Shimomura
#1830
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Osamu Shimomura was a Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, and professor emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University School of Medicine. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein with two American scientists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California-San Diego.
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David Baulcombe
#5979
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sir David Charles Baulcombe is a British plant scientist and geneticist. he is a Royal Society Research Professor. From 2007 to 2020 he was Regius Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
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Robert Lefkowitz
#2233
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Joseph Lefkowitz is an American physician and biochemist. He is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family G protein-coupled receptors, for which he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Brian Kobilka. He is currently an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as a James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Duke University.
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Alan Hodgkin
#1838
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was an English physiologist and biophysicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles. Early life and education Hodgkin was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 5 February 1914. He was the oldest of three sons of Quakers George Hodgkin and Mary Wilson Hodgkin. His father was the son of Thomas Hodgkin and had read for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge where he had befriended electrophysiologist Keith Lucas.
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Edvard Moser
#2296
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Edvard Ingjald Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In 2005, he and his then-wife May-Britt Moser discovered grid cells in the brain's medial entorhinal cortex. Grid cells are specialized neurons that provide the brain with a coordinate system and a metric for space. In 2018, he discovered a neural network that expresses a person's sense of time in experiences and memories located in the brain's lateral entorhinal cortex.
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Rupert Riedl
#3477
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Rupert Riedl was an Austrian zoologist. Biography Riedl was a scientist with broad interests, whose influence in epistemology grounded in evolutionary theory was notable, although less in English-speaking circles than in German or even Spanish speaking ones. His 1984 work, Biology of Knowledge: The evolutionary basis of reason examined cognitive abilities and the increasing complexity of biological diversification over the immense periods of evolutionary time.
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Yoshinori Ohsumi
#3758
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
is a Japanese cell biologist specializing in autophagy, the process that cells use to destroy and recycle cellular components. Ohsumi is a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology's Institute of Innovative Research. He received the Kyoto Prize for Basic Sciences in 2012, the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.
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Roger Wolcott Sperry
#2439
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Roger Wolcott Sperry was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sperry as the 44th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Aaron Beck
#518
Overall Influence
1921 - 2021 (100 years)
Aaron Temkin Beck was an American psychiatrist who was a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy . His pioneering methods are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck also developed self-report measures for depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory , which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression. In 1994 he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck, founded ...
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Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
#2819
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was an Italian geneticist. He was a population geneticist who taught at the University of Parma, the University of Pavia and then at Stanford University. Works Schooling and positions Cavalli-Sforza entered Ghislieri College in Pavia in 1939 and he received his M.D. from the University of Pavia in 1944. In 1949, he was appointed to a research post at the Department of Genetics, Cambridge University by the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald A. Fisher in the field of E. coli genetics. In 1950, he left the University of Cambridge to teach in northern Italy before taking up a professorship at Stanford in 1970.
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Osamu Hayaishi
#4685
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Osamu Hayaishi MJA, was a Japanese biochemist, physiologist, and military physician. He discovered Oxygenases at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, National Institutes of Health in 1955.
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Brian Charlesworth
#7091
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Brian Charlesworth is a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and editor of Biology Letters. Since 1997, he has been Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Edinburgh. He has been married since 1967 to the British evolutionary biologist Deborah Charlesworth.
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Marc Van Montagu
#5631
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Marc, Baron Van Montagu is a Belgian molecular biologist. He was full professor and director of the Laboratory of Genetics at the faculty of Sciences at Ghent University and scientific director of the genetics department of the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology . Together with Jozef Schell he founded the biotech company Plant Genetic Systems Inc. in 1982, of which he was scientific director and member of the board of directors. Van Montagu was also involved in founding the biotech company CropDesign, of which he was a board member from 1998 to 2004. He is president of the...
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Irving Weissman
#5640
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Irving Lerner "Irv" Weissman is a Professor of Pathology and Developmental Biology at Stanford University where he is the Director of the Stanford Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine along with Michael Longaker.
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Avram Hershko
#992
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Avram Hershko is a Hungarian-Israeli biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004. Biography He was born Herskó Ferenc in Karcag, Hungary, into a Jewish family, the son of Shoshana/Margit 'Manci' and Moshe Hershko, both teachers. During the Second World War, his father was forced into labor service in the Hungarian army and then taken as a prisoner by the Soviet Army. For years, Avram's family didn't known anything about what had happened to his father. Avram, his mother and older brother were put in a ghetto in Szolnok. During the final days of the ghetto, most Jews were sen...
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Leroy Hood
#4398
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Leroy "Lee" Edward Hood is an American biologist who has served on the faculties at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Washington. Hood has developed ground-breaking scientific instruments which made possible major advances in the biological sciences and the medical sciences. These include the first gas phase protein sequencer , for determining the sequence of amino acids in a given protein; a DNA synthesizer , to synthesize short sections of DNA; a peptide synthesizer , to combine amino acids into longer peptides and short proteins; the first automated DNA seque...
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Eric F. Wieschaus
#4314
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Eric Francis Wieschaus is an American evolutionary developmental biologist and 1995 Nobel Prize-winner. Early life Born in South Bend, Indiana, he attended John Carroll Catholic High School in Birmingham, Alabama before attending the University of Notre Dame for his undergraduate studies , and Yale University for his graduate work.
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Jaak Panksepp
#3142
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Jaak Panksepp was an Estonian-American neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term "affective neuroscience", the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals.
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Siegfried Scherer
#5773
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Siegfried Scherer is a German biologist, since 1991 Professor of Microbiology at the Technical University of Munich, Weihenstephan since 1991, where he is Managing Director of the Nutrition and Food Research Center ZIEL. Scherer is not a prominent creationist as often purported. He believes that religion and science are two different ways of approaching reality. He is married to anthropologist Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer.
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Denis Noble
#3206
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Denis Noble is a British physiologist and biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. Noble established The Third Way of Evolution project with James A. Shapiro which predicts that the entire framework of the modern synthesis will be replaced.
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Lewis Wolpert
#4566
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Lewis Wolpert was a South African-born British developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster. Wolpert was best known for his French flag model of embryonic development, where he used the French flag as a visual aid to explain how embryonic cells interpret genetic code for expressing characteristics of living organisms and explaining how signalling between cells early in morphogenesis could be used to inform cells with the same genetic regulatory network of their position and role.
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Tim Hunt
#2976
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir Richard Timothy Hunt, is a British biochemist and molecular physiologist. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Leland H. Hartwell for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells. While studying fertilized sea urchin eggs in the early 1980s, Hunt discovered cyclin, a protein that cyclically aggregates and is depleted during cell division cycles.
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Craig Mello
#4281
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Craig Cameron Mello is an American biologist and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Andrew Z. Fire, for the discovery of RNA interference. This research was conducted at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and published in 1998. Mello has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000.
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Francisco J. Ayala
#2009
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Francisco José Ayala Pereda was a Spanish-American evolutionary biologist, philosopher, and Catholic priest who was a longtime faculty member at the University of California, Irvine and University of California, Davis.
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Michael Denton
#6748
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michael John Denton is a British proponent of intelligent design and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He holds a PhD degree in biochemistry. Denton's book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, inspired intelligent design proponents Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe.
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Brian Kobilka
#2543
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Brian Kent Kobilka is an American physiologist and a recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Lefkowitz for discoveries that reveal the workings of G protein-coupled receptors. He is currently a professor in the department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also a co-founder of ConfometRx, a biotechnology company focusing on G protein-coupled receptors. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
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Leland H. Hartwell
#3740
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Leland Harrison Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells.
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Robert F. Furchgott
#2385
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Robert Francis Furchgott was a Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist who contributed to the discovery of nitric oxide as a transient cellular signal in mammalian systems. Early life and education Furchgott was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Arthur Furchgott , a department store owner, and Pena Furchgott. He graduated with from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1937 with a degree in chemistry and went on to earn a Ph.D in biochemistry at Northwestern University in 1940.
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Jeffrey C. Hall
#4674
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jeffrey Connor Hall is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Hall is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brandeis University and currently resides in Cambridge, Maine. Hall spent his career examining the neurological component of fly courtship and behavioral rhythms. Through his research on the neurology and behavior of Drosophila melanogaster, Hall uncovered essential mechanisms of the circadian clocks and shed light on the foundations for sexual differentiation in the nervous system. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his revolutionary work in the field of chronobiology, and nominated for the T.
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Baruj Benacerraf
#2366
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Baruj Benacerraf was a Venezuelan-American immunologist, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the "discovery of the major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface protein molecules important for the immune system's distinction between self and non-self." His colleagues and shared recipients were Jean Dausset and George Davis Snell.
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Stanislas Dehaene
#1445
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".
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Michael Rosbash
#4515
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael Morris Rosbash is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Rosbash is a professor and researcher at Brandeis University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Rosbash's research group cloned the Drosophila period gene in 1984 and proposed the Transcription Translation Negative Feedback Loop for circadian clocks in 1990. In 1998, they discovered the cycle gene, clock gene, and cryptochrome photoreceptor in Drosophila through the use of forward genetics, by first identifying the phenotype of a mutant and then determining the genetics behind the mutation. Rosbash was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.
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Ralph M. Steinman
#3658
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Ralph Marvin Steinman was a Canadian physician and medical researcher at Rockefeller University, who in 1973 discovered and named dendritic cells while working as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Zanvil A. Cohn, also at Rockefeller University. Steinman was one of the recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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