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,

#1501

William J. Mitsch

William J. Mitsch

#21487

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

William Mitsch, born March 29, 1947, in Wheeling, West Virginia, US, is an ecosystem ecologist and ecological engineer who was co-laureate of the 2004 Stockholm Water Prize in August 2004 as a result of a career in wetland ecology and restoration, ecological engineering, and ecological modelling.

#1502

Marcus Morton Rhoades

#34419

Overall Influence

1903 - 1991 (88 years)

Marcus Morton Rhoades was an American cytogeneticist. Education He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1927, a Master of Science degree in 1928 from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. degree in 1932 from Cornell University where he was a trainee of Rollins A. Emerson alongside future Nobel Prize winners George Beadle and Barbara McClintock, and completed a thesis on the topic of cytoplasmic male sterility in maize.

#1503

Bruce M. Spiegelman

#47300

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Bruce Michael Spiegelman is an American biochemist and cell biologist. Since 2008, Spiegelman has been the Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and director of the Center for Metabolism and Chronic Disease at the Dana-Farber.

#1504

James R. Lupski

#28438

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

James R. Lupski is the Cullen Endowed Chair in Molecular Genetics and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine. Lupski obtained his BA degree from New York University in 1979 and his PhD and MD degrees in 1984 and 1985, respectively, from the same institution. He later moved for his Residency in Pediatrics to Baylor College of Medicine, where he has stayed since. Lupski is affected by a genetic disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth and has studied the condition as part of his research. He has contributed to the discovery and definition of genomic disorders and se...

#1505

Jingmai O'Connor

#36835

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Jingmai Kathleen O'Connor is a paleontologist who works as a curator at the Field Museum. Biography O'Connor is from Pasadena, California. Her mother is a geologist. O'Connor says that while she was not a dinosaur enthusiast as a child, being present for her mother's geology fieldwork began her interest in the subject. She explains, "I enjoyed going to the field with her, collecting rocks, minerals, and fossils, and playing in the lab."

#1506

John Woodland Hastings

John Woodland Hastings

#32706

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

John Woodland "Woody" Hastings, was a leader in the field of photobiology, especially bioluminescence, and was one of the founders of the field of circadian biology . He was the Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. He published over 400 papers and co-edited three books.

#1507

Jeremy Jackson

#41802

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jeremy Bradford Cook Jackson is an American ecologist, paleobiologist, and conservationist. He is an emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, and visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. He studies threats and solutions to human impacts on the environment and the ecology and evolution of tropical seas. Jackson has more than 170 scientific publications and 11 books, with nearly 40,000 citations listed on Google Scholar.

#1508

Jacques Banchereau

#43681

Overall Influence

Jacques Banchereau is an internationally prominent French American immunologist and molecular biologist. As of 2022, he is Chief Scientific Officer at Immunai. He was formerly professor and director of immunological sciences at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and also the former chief science officer, senior vice president, and DTA head of inflammation & virology at Hoffman-La Roche. He is best known for his extensive research on dendritic cells with Nobel Laureate Ralph M. Steinman. He is the fifth most cited immunologist ranked by Times Higher Education's report.

#1509

Bruce Lahn

#29286

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Bruce Lahn is a Chinese-born American geneticist. Lahn came to the U.S. from China to continue his education in the late 1980s. He is the William B. Graham professor of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. He is also the founder of the Center for Stem Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Lahn currently serves as the chief scientist of VectorBuilder, Inc.

#1510

Gerald Crabtree

#36146

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Gerald R. Crabtree is the David Korn Professor at Stanford University and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is known for defining the Ca2+-calcineurin-NFAT signaling pathway, pioneering the development of synthetic ligands for regulation of biologic processes and discovering chromatin regulatory mechanisms involved in cancer and brain development. He is a founder of Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Amplyx Pharmaceuticals, and Foghorn Therapeutics.

#1511

Patrick D. Wall

Patrick D. Wall

#49297

Overall Influence

1925 - 2001 (76 years)

Patrick David Wall was a British neuroscientist described as 'the world's leading expert on pain' and best known for the gate control theory of pain. Early life and education Wall was born in Nottingham on 25 April 1925 to Thomas Wall, the director of education for Middlesex, and his wife Ruth Cresswell. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and the University of Oxford, studying medicine at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became interested in pain. He published his first two papers, in the prominent science journals Brain and Nature, at the age of 21. While at Oxford he had also helpe...

#1512

Doris Löve

#37832

Overall Influence

1918 - 2000 (82 years)

Doris Benta Maria Löve, née Wahlén was a Swedish systematic botanist, particularly active in the Arctic. Biography Doris Löve was born in Kristianstad, Sweden. She studied botany at Lund University from 1937. She married her fellow student and colleague, the Icelander Áskell Löve. She received her PhD in botany in 1944. She focused her doctorate on the sexuality of Melandrium. After their studies, the couple moved to Iceland. They moved to Winnipeg in 1951, to Montreal in 1955, and to Boulder in 1965. At universities where Áskell Löve taught, Doris Löve could not hold a faculty position at the same time as her husband.

#1513

Robert Powell

#16681

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Robert ″Bob″ Powell is an American herpetologist. His main research interest is in the herpetofauna of the Caribbean. Career Powell was born in Germany but raised in Missouri. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1970 from the University of Missouri and his Master of Arts in 1971 from the University of Missouri–Kansas City. In 1984, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri with the thesis ″Variation in Spotted Salamanders from Missouri". In 1989, he became professor and coordinator in the biology department at the Avila College in Kansas City. From 1994 until 2018 he was professor for biology at the Avila University in Kansas City.

#1514

Carl Pabo

#32905

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Carl O. Pabo is a biophysicist. He is the founder and president of Humanity 2050, a nonprofit institute. Education B.S. from Yale, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry in 1974Ph.D. from Harvard, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1980.

#1515

Elly Tanaka

#44489

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Elly Margaret Tanaka is a biochemist and senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. Tanaka studies the molecular cell biology of limb and spinal cord regeneration as well as the evolution of regeneration.

#1516

Jennifer Thomson

#41458

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jennifer Ann Thomson is a South African microbiologist, author and most notably an expert on and proponent of the agricultural benefit of Genetically modified organisms . Thomson was born in Cape Town, South Africa and she is currently a professor at her alma mater the University of Cape Town.

#1517

Alan Hall

#40479

Overall Influence

1952 - 2015 (63 years)

Alan Hall FRS was a British cell biologist and a biology professor at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, where he was chair of the Cell Biology program. Hall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999.

#1518

Ruth Nussinov

#40744

Overall Influence

Ruth Nussinov is an Israeli-American biologist born in Rehovot who works as a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and is the Senior Principal Scientist and Principal Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. Nussinov is also the Editor in Chief of the Current Opinion in Structural Biology and formerly of the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

#1519

Peter Anthony Lawrence

#29876

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Peter Anthony Lawrence is a British developmental biologist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the Zoology Department of the University of Cambridge. He was a staff scientist of the Medical Research Council from 1969 to 2006.

#1520

Ernst Priesner

#50004

Overall Influence

1934 - 1994 (60 years)

Ernst Priesner was an Austrian biologist. He pioneered in the field of sex pheromones at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen. His entomological main emphasis was on the field of Hymenoptera and butterflies.

#1521

Robert Lustig

#14739

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Robert H. Lustig is an American pediatric endocrinologist. He is Professor emeritus of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco , where he specialized in neuroendocrinology and childhood obesity. He is also director of UCSF's WATCH program , and president and co-founder of the non-profit Institute for Responsible Nutrition.

#1522

David A. Eisner

David A. Eisner

#37110

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

David Alfred Eisner, FRCP , FMedSci, is British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiac Physiology at the University of Manchester and editor-in-chief of The Journal of General Physiology . Education Eisner was born in 1955 in Manchester, the son of the physicist and writer Herbert Eisner. After attending Manchester Grammar School, he received his B.A. in natural sciences at King's College, Cambridge in 1976. In 1979 he obtained a D.Phil. in physiology at Oxford University in the laboratory of Denis Noble for work on the sodium pump in cardiac muscle.

#1523

António R. Damásio

#50021

Overall Influence

#1524

Mary Collins

#31913

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Mary Katharine Levinge Collins, Lady Hunt is a British Professor of virology and the director of the Queen Mary University of London Blizard Institute. She served as Provost at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Formerly, Collins taught in the Division of Infection and Immunity at University College London, and was the head of the Division of Advanced Therapies at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, and the Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Molecular Virology. Her research group studies the use of viruses as vectors for ...

#1525

William Jencks

#32683

Overall Influence

1927 - 2007 (80 years)

William Platt Jencks was an American biochemist. He was noted particularly for his work on enzymes, using concepts drawn from organic chemistry to understand their mechanisms. Career Jencks graduated from Harvard College in 1947 with a degree in English, and earned a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard University in 1951. He interned at the Peter Bent Brigham hospital. Jencks conducted his first postdoctoral research for two years with Fritz Lipmann at Harvard Medical School. Jencks was drafted into the Army Medical Corps and was assigned to the Army Medical Service Graduate School at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC.

#1526

Rakesh Mishra

#26175

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Rakesh Kumar Mishra is an Indian scientist specializing in genomics and epigenetics. Mishra retired as the 6th director of CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, on the April 30th, 2021. He is currently the Director of TIGS, Bengaluru and holds J. C. Bose Fellowship at CCMB.

#1527

Ravindra Gupta

#35354

Overall Influence

Professor Ravindra "Ravi" Kumar Gupta is a professor of clinical microbiology at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease at the University of Cambridge. He is also a member of the faculty of the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa.

#1528

Herschel K. Mitchell

#35269

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

Herschel Kenworthy Mitchell was an American professor of biochemistry who spent most of his career on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. He was one of many researchers interested in vitamin B6 in the early 1940s and is credited as one of the discoverers of folic acid. He later focused his research on Drosophila , in particular the genetics and biochemistry of the heat shock response.

#1529

Peter McGuffin

#32741

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Peter McGuffin is a psychiatrist and geneticist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Early life Peter McGuffin was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on 4 February 1949, the eldest of 3 children of Martha Melba and William Brown McGuffin, a merchant navy officer and Royal Naval reservist. The family moved to the Isle of Wight in 1959 on the appointment of William as a Trinity House Pilot for the Port of Southampton.

#1530

Magnus Manske

#8371

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Heinrich Magnus Manske is a German biochemist, who is a leading researcher on malaria. He is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and a software developer of one of the first versions of the MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia and a number of other websites.

#1531

Jennifer Gardy

#40581

Overall Influence

Jennifer Gardy is a Canadian scientist, educator and broadcaster, with expertise in the fields of molecular biology, biochemistry, and bioinformatics. Since February 2019 she has been the Deputy Director, Surveillance, Data, and Epidemiology on the Global Health: Malaria team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She was previously an associate professor at the University of British Columbia's School of Population and Public Health, a Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics, and a Senior Scientist at the BC Centre for Disease Control. She is an occasional host of CBC's The Nature of Things, a science communicator, and a children's book author.

#1532

Piet Borst

#32831

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Piet Borst CBE is emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Amsterdam , and until 1999 director of research and chairman of the board of directors of the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoekziekenhuis . He continued to work at the NKI-AVL as a staff member and group leader until 2016.

#1533

Yuen Kwok-yung

#29805

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Yuen Kwok-yung is a Hong Kong microbiologist, physician and surgeon. He is a prolific researcher, with most of his nearly 800 papers related to research on novel microbes or emerging infectious diseases. He led a team identifying the SARS coronavirus that caused the SARS pandemic of 2003–4, and traced its genetic origins to wild bats. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, he has acted as expert adviser to the Hong Kong government.

#1534

David Linden

#18555

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

David J. Linden is an American professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and the author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. The book The Accidental Mind is an attempt to explain the human brain to intelligent lay readers, and recently received a silver medal in the category of Science from the Independent Publisher Association. As of July 1, 2008, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neurophysiology. Linden's second book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exerc...

#1535

Harold A. Mooney

#42205

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Harold A. "Hal" Mooney is an American ecologist and professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. He earned his Ph.D. at Duke University in 1960 and was employed by University of California-Los Angeles the same year. He joined the staff at Stanford University in 1968. He is an expert on plants and the functioning of ecosystems from the Tropics to the Arctic. He is a highly cited scientist.

#1536

Lance Liotta

#44069

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Lance A. Liotta is the Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine at George Mason University. His research team was the first to propose the existence of the autocrine motility factor. In 1985, he received the Rhoads Award from the American Association for Cancer Research. In 1987, he received the National Lectureship Award from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. His other awards include the Warner-Lambert Parke Davis Award and the Surgeon General's Medallion.

#1537

Boris Magasanik

#34369

Overall Influence

1919 - 2013 (94 years)

Boris Magasanik was a microbiologist and biochemist who was the Jacques Monod Professor Emeritus of Microbiology in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After moving from Harvard Medical School in 1960, Magasanik spent the rest of his research career at MIT, including an influential decade as the head of the Department of Biology from 1967–77. Magasanik's research interests focused on gene regulation, including study of nitrogen metabolic regulation in bacteria, catabolite repression, and intracellular signaling via two-component systems. Magasanik retired i...

#1538

John Quackenbush

John Quackenbush

#39846

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

John Quackenbush is an American computational biologist and genome scientist. He is a professor of biostatistics and computational biology and a professor of cancer biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute , as well as the director of its Center for Cancer Computational Biology . Quackenbush also holds an appointment as a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

#1539

Susan Gottesman

#33767

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Susan Gottesman is a microbiologist at the National Cancer Institute , which is part of the National Institutes of Health. Gottesman has been the editor of the Annual Review of Microbiology since 2008.

#1540

Catherine Dulac

#43424

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Catherine Dulac is a French–American biologist. She is the Higgins Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, where she served as department chair from 2007 to 2013. She is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was born in 1963 in France. She came to the United States for her postdoctoral study in 1991.

#1541

Deepak Pental

#37522

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Deepak Pental is a Professor of Genetics and the Ex Vice Chancellor at the University of Delhi. He is a noted researcher whose current research interests lie in development of transgenics and marker-assisted breeding of crops. He took charge of the post of Vice-chancellor of the University succeeding Professor Deepak Nayyar on 1 September 2005. As the VC, Pental has outlined his agenda to update the library system, work on teachers’ recruitment, increase student accommodation facilities and bring researchers working abroad to India. A new frog species, Minervarya Pentali, discovered in Wester...

#1542

H. Richard Winn

#23377

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dr. H. Richard Winn is an American neurosurgeon, and professor of neurosurgery and neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Winn was chairman of neurological surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine from 1983 to 2002. Winn has made numerous contributions to the field of neurosurgery, specifically to the physiology of cerebral blood flow regulation and clinical studies of the natural history of cerebral aneurysms. A leading international Neurosurgical Prize is named after Dr. Winn.

#1543

Walter Boron

#28795

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Walter F. Boron is an American scientist and the 72nd president of the American Physiological Society . He was Secretary-General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences. Additionally, Boron is co-editor, along with Emile L. Boulpaep, of the textbook Medical Physiology and Concise Medical Physiology. He is a former editor-in-chief of two leading physiology journals, Physiological Reviews and Physiology.

#1544

Robert G Roeder

#50361

Overall Influence

#1545

Neil Campbell

#37428

Overall Influence

1946 - 2004 (58 years)

Neil Allison Campbell was an American scientist known best for his textbook, Biology, first published in 1987 and repeatedly through many subsequent editions. The title is popular worldwide and has been used by over 700,000 students in both high school and college-level classes.

#1546

Pierre Dansereau

Pierre Dansereau

#12116

Overall Influence

1911 - 2011 (100 years)

Pierre Dansereau was a Canadian ecologist from Quebec known as one of the "fathers of ecology". Biography Born in Outremont, Quebec , he received a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture in 1936 and a Ph.D. in Biological Science in 1939 from the University of Geneva. From 1939 until 1942 he worked at the Montreal Botanical Garden. From 1943 until 1950 he taught at the Université de Montréal. From 1950 until 1955 he worked at the University of Michigan Botanical Gardens. From 1955 until 1961 he worked in the Faculty of Science and as the director of the Botanical Institute at the Université de Montréal.

#1547

Edward L. Kessel

#41422

Overall Influence

1904 - 1997 (93 years)

Edward Luther Kessel was an American biologist known for his work as an entomologist and writings to reconcile science and religion. Early life and education Kessel was born on 27 April 1904 in Osborne, Kansas to George Grant Kessel and Hattie Levon Kessel, but the family moved to South Africa in 1908, and later in 1916 to San Joaquin County, California where he grew up in the farming community of Ripon. The elder Kessel was a Free Methodist preacher, sparking Kessel's lifelong interest in the reconciliation of science and religion. Kessel began studies for the ministry at Greenville College in Illinois and Church Divinity School of the Pacific before finishing his B.S.

#1548

Joseph S. Nelson

#45371

Overall Influence

1937 - 2011 (74 years)

Joseph Schieser Nelson was an American ichthyologist. He is best known for the book Fishes of the World , which is the standard reference in fish systematics and evolution. Nelson obtained his PhD from University of British Columbia in 1965. He retired in 2002 from the University of Alberta where he made most of his career; he continued to hold position as a Professor Emeritus and stayed scientifically active until his final years.

#1549

Alex George

#29906

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Alexander Segger George is an Australian botanist. He is the authority on the plant genera Banksia and Dryandra. The "bizarre" Restionaceae genus Alexgeorgea was named in his honour in 1976. Early life Alex Segger George was born in Western Australia on 4 April 1939.

#1550

Sherwin Carlquist

Sherwin Carlquist

#39469

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Sherwin John Carlquist FMLS was an American botanist and photographer. Education He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952 and a Ph.D. in botany in 1956, also at Berkeley. During his graduate studies, Marion Elizabeth Stilwell Cave instructed him in the nuances of plant microphotography and embryology. Carlquist did a postdoctoral study at Harvard University from 1955 to 1956.

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