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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#15201

Christophe Legendre

#181693

Overall Influence

#15202

Lesley Hoyles

#180906

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Lesley Hoyles is a Welsh microbiologist who is Professor of Microbiome and Systems Biology at Nottingham Trent University. She combines in vivo and in vitro microbiology and bioinformatics research to better understand how the gut microbiota influences health and disease.

#15203

Tanya Leise

#66759

Overall Influence

Tanya L. Leise was an American biomathematician specializing in the mathematical modeling of circadian rhythms and related phenomena such as jet lag and hibernation. She was a professor of mathematics at Amherst College.

#15204

John M. Jumper

#101015

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

John Michael Jumper is an American senior research scientist at DeepMind Technologies. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. Jumper has stated that the AlphaFold team plans to release 100 million protein structures. The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021.

#15205

Wesley Kingston Whitten

Wesley Kingston Whitten

#166715

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Wesley Kingston Whitten was a professor of reproductive biology at the Australian National University and later director of the Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine, United States. He was educated at the University of Sydney receiving a BVSc with honors in 1939; a BSc in 1941; and DSc in 1962. He was a Walter and Eliza Hall Fellow in Veterinary Science from 1940 to 1941. He served in the Australian Army Veterinary Corps and was an Australian Army Service Corps Captain from 1941 to 1945. He was research officer in Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation from 1946 to 1949.

#15206

Mason Durie

#52891

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Sir Mason Harold Durie is a New Zealand professor of Māori Studies and research academic at Massey University. He is known for his contributions to Māori health. In 2020, he was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, the highest honour in New Zealand's royal honours system.

#15207

Kurt Von Figura

#181714

Overall Influence

#15208

Emily H. Vokes

#174341

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Emily Hoskins Vokes is an American malacologist, palaeontologist, and former university professor. She is an authority on the Muricidae, a large and diverse family of predatory sea snails, or marine gastropod mollusks. Vokes worked both on her own and with her husband, geologist Harold Ernest Vokes.

#15209

Wally Clark

#158189

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Walter Clive Clark was a New Zealand zoologist who specialised in the study of nematodes and pycnogonids. He was a professor at Massey University and later the University of Canterbury. Early life, family, and education Born in Christchurch on 22 October 1927, Clark was the son of Clive Harold Clark and Ellen Martha Clark . He had his early education at Bruce Bay, where his academic potential was first recognised, before moving back to Christchurch about the end of 1942. Clark later studied at Canterbury University College, graduating MSc with first-class honours in 1957. He was an assistant ...

#15210

Ana Sofia Reboleira

#116447

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Ana Sofia Pereira Serrenho Reboleira is a Portuguese biologist and speleologist, best known for her discovery of over 70 species of flora and fauna, and the description of 17 new taxa, and for her exploration work at the Krubera Cave.

#15211

Zhang Mingjie

#110761

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Zhang Mingjie is a Chinese structural biologist. He is Kerry Holdings Professor of Science and the Chair Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Biochemistry at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology . He was an overseas assessor of the Chinese Academy of Science. His research is focusing on molecular mechanisms of organization and regulation of neuronal signaling complexes and machineries in controlling cell polarity by using protein crystallography and NMR spectroscopy. In 2006, his structural and biochemical studies in signal transduction complex organization was rewarded fo...

#15212

Katy Payne

#110188

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Katharine Boynton "Katy" Payne is an American zoologist and researcher in the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. Payne studied music and biology in college and after a decade doing research in the savanna elephant country in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, she founded Cornell's Elephant Listening Project in 1999.

#15213

Michael E. O'Donnell

Michael E. O'Donnell

#172918

Overall Influence

Michael E. O’ Donnell is an American biochemist and a professor at the Rockefeller University specializing in the field of DNA replication. Education O’ Donnell attended the University of Portland, receiving his B.S in 1975. During his subsequent graduate studies at the University of Michigan, he became trained as an enzymologist; he earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1982. O'Donnell continued with his postdoctoral training at Stanford University under the supervision of nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg and I. Robert Lehman in the field of nucleic acid enzymology.

#15214

Lyn G. Cook

#181558

Overall Influence

Lynette Gai Cook is an Australian botanist and entomologist. She earned a PhD from the ANU in 2001 with a thesis entitled The biology, evolution and systematics of the Gall-inducing scale insect Apiomorpha Rübsaamen

#15215

Tara McAllister

#169633

Overall Influence

Tara G McAllister is a New Zealand freshwater ecology academic and is associated with Te Pūnaha Matatini at the University of Auckland. She is a Māori of Te Aitanga ā Māhaki, Ngāti Porou, and European descent.

#15216

Dipak K Banerjee

#181799

Overall Influence

Dipak K Banerjee is an Indian scholar of Biochemistry. He is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and chairman of his company, DIC India Ltd. Banerjee received his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry from the University of Calcutta. He has authored and co-authored articles on Glycosyltransferases and Breast cancer cells and is a fellow member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#15217

Rick C. West

#167949

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Rick C. West is a Canadian arachnologist and an expert on the taxonomy of tarantula spiders. West was born in Victoria, British Columbia. He has been interested in spiders since childhood, and collected his first tarantula, Aphonopelma eutylenum, at the age of 13. He worked primarily as a Chief Constable for a local Animal Humane Society, but also have been involved with the collecting, breeding, rearing and photography of theraphosid spiders. West has traveled to over 27 countries to document and study them in their environment, has been a host, presenter and co-producer in several tarantula...

#15218

Paul Maas

#169160

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Paulus Johannes Maria "Paul" Maas is a botanist from the Netherlands and a specialist in the flora of the neotropics. Maas has identified and named about two hundred fifty plants from the Burmanniaceae, the Costus Family , the Gentian Family , the Bloodwort Family , the Banana Family , the Olacaceae, the Triuridaceae, and the Ginger Family .

#15219

Andrea Grottoli

#139069

Overall Influence

Andréa Geneviève Grottoli is a Canadian biologist who is Professor of Earth Sciences at the Ohio State University. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was named the 2021 American Geophysical Union Rachel Carson Lecturer. She is the President of the International Coral Reef Society.

#15220

David Weiss

#181822

Overall Influence

#15221

Sarah Reichard

#180811

Overall Influence

1957 - 2016 (59 years)

Sarah Reichard was a botanist and tenured full professor who held an endowed chair at the University of Washington's School of Environmental and Forest Sciences in the College of the Environment. Reichard was also the first permanent woman director of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens, overseeing the Washington Park Arboretum and Center for Urban Horticulture. Her research focussed on plant conservation, including rare and invasive species. She published more than 50 studies in peer-reviewed journals and two books. Reichard has been described as "a trailblazing scholar in a time wh...

#15222

Cheryl A. Zimmer

#177603

Overall Influence

Cheryl A. Zimmer is a conservation biologist whose research interests are focused marine population ecology, specifically the role of hydrodynamics as a driving force in the evolution of marine life.

#15223

Fabian Leendertz

#168969

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Fabian Hubertus Leendertz is a German biologist, veterinarian, and expert on zoonosis, specialising his research on primates, studying leprosy and anthrax in chimpanzees since 2014. In 2020, he was appointed to the team researching the origins of COVID-19 by the World Health Organization, and was awarded a Champions of the Earth award by the United Nations. In 2021, he began a project group researching epidemiology and pathogenicity at the Robert Koch Institute, was appointed founding director of the Helmholtz Institute for One Health, and started a professorship at the University of Greifswa...

#15224

Doris Wagner

#181704

Overall Influence

Doris Wagner is an American biologist who is the Robert I. Williams Term Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research looks to better understand the structure-function relationships of plant cells. She established the Epigenomics of Plants International Consortium. Wagner is a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists.

#15225

Michael C. O'Donovan

#180169

Overall Influence

Michael C. O'Donovan is a Scottish psychiatric geneticist who researches the genetics of schizophrenia. He is a clinical professor in the Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences and the deputy director of the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at the Cardiff University School of Medicine in Cardiff, Wales. He also leads the Schizophrenia Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. Educated at Glasgow University, he also serves as Academic Psychiatry Lead for the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Wales. He was lead author of a 2014 study in Nature which identified over 100 genetic loci associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia.

#15226

Howard Osofsky

#180287

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Howard Joseph Osofsky is an American gynecologist, obstetrician, and psychiatrist. Osofsky earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Syracuse University and completed his medical studies at the State University of New York College of Medicine. He is the Kathleen and John Bricker Chair and Professor of Psychiatry at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans. Osofsky married Joy Doniger in September 1963.

#15227

Fredric N. Busch

#105360

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Fredric Neal Busch is a Weill Cornell Medical College professor of clinical psychiatry based in New York City. He is also a faculty member at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

#15228

Molly S. Bray

#181900

Overall Influence

Molly S. Bray is an American geneticist, currently the Susan T. Jastrow Human Ecology Chair for Excellence in Nutritional Sciences at University of Texas at Austin. Bray is a nationally recognized expert and a featured speaker on the genetics of obesity, energy balance, and exercise response. She is a Professor and chair in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, with a master's degree in Exercise Physiology from the University of Houston and a PhD in Human and Molecular Genetics from the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She also served as the for...

#15229

Sophie Achard

#110869

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Sophie Achard is a French statistician and neuroscientist whose research concerns the statistics of the pattern of connectivity in the brain. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation laboratory at Grenoble Alpes University.

#15230

Jin Zhang

#131260

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Jin Zhang is a Chinese-American biochemist. She is a professor of pharmacology, chemistry and biochemistry, and biomedical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Early life and education Zhang was born in Beijing, China. She received her Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1995. She completed her PhD with David G. Lynn at the University of Chicago in 2000, and conducted postdoctoral research with Roger Y. Tsien and Susan S. Taylor at the University of California, San Diego.

#15231

Hu Dujing

#170333

Overall Influence

1913 - 2019 (106 years)

Hu Dujing was a Chinese plant physiologist, agronomist, and educator. He was a long-time professor at Hunan Agricultural University and co-founded the university's Department of Botany in 1951. Biography Hu was born in 1913 in Changsha, Hunan, Republic of China, with his ancestral home in Xiangtan. After graduating from Wuhan University, he pursued graduate studies in plant hormone and mineral nutrient at the Institute of Agriculture at National Southwestern Associated University under academician . His research paper on plant growth hormone was published in the journal Science in April 1940.

#15232

Henry Colyear Dawkins

#175402

Overall Influence

1921 - 1992 (71 years)

Henry Colyear Dawkins was a British forester, botanist, ecologist and statistician, a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. One of three brothers, he studied botany at Oxford, following in the footsteps of his elder brother John. From 1942 he worked as a District Forest Officer in the Colonial Service in Uganda in the Northern district of Acholi, where he set about learning the fundamentals of tropical forestry. He was awarded an MBE in the 1956 New Year Honours list for "services to Uganda". Later, he returned to Oxford as a lecturer, publishing several papers during his career. His 1958 ...

#15233

Maria Follieri

#172550

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Maria Follieri was a pioneering Italian archaeobotanist and held the Chair of Palaeobotany at La Sapienza. Early life Follieri was born in Rome in 1932. She studied Natural Sciences at the University La Sapienza, graduating in 1954.

#15234

Stavroula Mili

#180670

Overall Influence

Stavroula "Voula" Mili is a Greek molecular biologist researching the regulation, functional consequences, and disease associations of localized RNAs. She is a NIH Stadtman Investigator at the National Cancer Institute.

#15235

Matthew Sacchet

#143709

Overall Influence

Matthew D. Sacchet is an American neuroscientist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University. At Massachusetts General Hospital , Sacchet directs the Meditation Research Program. His research focuses on advancing the science of meditation and includes studies of brain structure and function using multimodal neuroimaging, in addition to neurofeedback, clinical trials, and computational approaches . He is notable for his work at the intersection of neuroscience, meditation, and mental illness. His work has been cited over 4,500 times and covered by major media outlets including CBS, NBC, NPR, Time, and The Wall Street Journal.

#15236

Mónica Medina

#132241

Overall Influence

Dr. Mónica Medina is a professor of organismal biology at the Pennsylvania State University. She is known for environmental activism, such as fighting to protect Varadero Reef, and her research on the ecology and evolution of symbiosis by studying the relationships between cnidarian, endosymbiotic dinoflagellates, and other microbes.

#15237

David Hopwood

#181969

Overall Influence

#15238

Anita Dolly Panek

#86149

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Anita Dolly Haubenstock Panek is a Brazilian biochemist. She emigrated from Poland to Brazil because of World War II. She received a B.Sc. in Chemistry, 1954 and a Ph.D. in 1962. She became a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

#15239

Lene Buhl-Mortensen

#121985

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Lene Buhl-Mortensen is a Dano-Norwegian marine biologist. She is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research. She is an expert on the biogeography of the amphipod fauna in Norwegian waters, on the taxonomy of amphipods, barnacles and copepods, and on mapping of biodiversity in the Barents Sea.

#15240

William L. Peters

#177169

Overall Influence

1939 - 2000 (61 years)

William L. Peters was an American entomologist specializing in mayflies, especially those in the family Leptophlebiidae. Biography William Lee Peters was born in Leavenworth, Kansas. His father was an electrical engineer; the family moved to New Orleans so that he could work on military aircraft during the Second World War. He gained his B.A. degree at the University of Kansas in 1960. He earned his M.S. in zoology and entomology at the University of Utah in 1962. In 1966, under George F. Edmunds Jr., he completed his PhD, also at Utah, on the taxonomy of the Leptophlebiidae, a family of mayflies.

#15241

Wanda Quilhot

#173967

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Wanda Quilhot is a Chilean biologist, most noted for her work in lichenology. She was among the first women scientists allowed to participate in research in Antarctica with the International Council for Science , conducting research there beginning in 1963. Three lichen species Menegazzia wandae, Pseudocyphellaria wandae, and Strigula wandae have been named in her honor. The Latin American Group of Lichenology has created a prize in her name to recognize research excellence in the field of lichenology.

#15242

Crystal Watson

#163657

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Crystal Watson is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. She is an expert in health security, biodefense, and risk assessment and preparedness for emerging infectious diseases. She is currently working on the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

#15243

Juliet Wege

#175759

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Juliet Ann Wege is an Australian botanist. She graduated in 1992 and gained a PhD at The University of Western Australia in 1999 with a thesis titled "Morphological and anatomical variation within Stylidium : a systematic perspective". As of 2021 she works as a researcher at the Western Australian Herbarium run by Western Australia's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions and is managing editor of Nuytsia. Her main area of expertise is in taxonomy and study of the Stylidiaceae family of triggerplants.

#15244

Biörn Ivemark

#165132

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

Biörn Ivemark was a Swedish pediatrician and pathologist. He is credited with characterizing asplenia with cardiovascular anomalies, also sometimes known as "Ivemark syndrome". Born in Karlstad, Ivemark graduated from Karolinska Institutet in 1951 and received his research doctorate in 1955.

#15245

Susana Lima

#175761

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Susana Q. Lima is a Portuguese neuroscientist and principal investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. Her research studies neural mechanisms of sexual behavior and mate choice.

#15246

Thomas A. Drake

#182064

Overall Influence

#15247

Frank Sargent

#180237

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Frank Sargent is Professor of Microbial Biotechnology at Newcastle University, UK. He has specialised in bacterial bioenergetics, particularly protein transport and enzymes containing nickel and molybdenum, including biotechnology applications.

#15248

Raul Cano

#177440

Overall Influence

Raul Cano is a microbiologist and medical mycologist, Professor Emeritus at the biology department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California. His claim to fame is having revived microorganisms from amber alongside entomologist George Poinar Jr. Initially, a company was founded to promote medical uses of the microorganisms, which proved unsuccessful.

#15249

William Percy Rogers

#167573

Overall Influence

1914 - 1997 (83 years)

William Percy Rogers was an Australian zoologist known for his work in parasitology. He was Professor of Parasitology at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute 1966–1979.

#15250

Shawn Domagal-Goldman

#169994

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman is a research space scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who specializes in exoplanets, Archean geochemistry, planetary atmospheres, and astrobiology. Education and career Domagal-Goldman has a master's degree in Earth Sciences from the University of Rochester and a PhD in Geosciences and Astrobiology from the Pennsylvania State University.

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