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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#15301

Boyan Petrov

Boyan Petrov
#69268
Overall Influence
1973 - 2018 (45 years)
Boyan Petrov was a Bulgarian zoologist and mountaineer, who worked at the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia. He was married to Radoslava Nenova and they have a child – Yavor Petrov. At the time of his disappearance he had climbed 10 out of the 14 eight-thousanders, all without supplemental oxygen. As of October 2019, this achievement tied him with Atanas Skatov as the Bulgarian climber with the highest number of successful ascents of peaks over 8000 meters. He was the first Bulgarian to climb four of those mountains: Gasherbrum I , Kangchenjunga , K2 and Manaslu .
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#15302

Nikolai Vavilov

#182589
Overall Influence
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#15303

Lixing Lao

#175316
Overall Influence
Lixing Lao is a Chinese-American physiologist and acupuncturist. He is known for his research on acupuncture and other forms of traditional Chinese medicine. Since late 2013, he has been the director of the University of Hong Kong's School of Chinese Medicine, He has also held the Vivian Taam Wong Professorship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Hong Kong since 2014. He is also an adjunct professor of family and community medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he also directs the Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Program in the Center for Integrative Me...
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#15304

J. P. Harding

#142304
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
John Philip Harding was a British zoologist, Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum from 1954 to 1971 and professor at Westfield College, London from 1971 until retirement in 1977. In 1937 he married Sidnie Manton; they had a daughter Elizabeth and adopted a son.
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#15305

Shinji Hayashi

#182612
Overall Influence
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#15306

Julian Monge Najera

Julian Monge Najera
#71981
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Julián Monge-Nájera Scientific career Monge-Nájera was the Editor of Revista de Biología Tropical/International Journal of Tropical Biology and Conservation for more than 30 years, but simultaneously published nearly 200 scientific articles and more than 20 books on a variety of biological topics and other areas.
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#15307

Bojana Stefanovic

#177224
Overall Influence
Bojana Stefanovic is a Canadian neuroscientist. She is a senior scientist at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Functional Brain Neuroimaging at the University of Toronto.
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#15308

Stefan Karlsson

Stefan Karlsson
#176849
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stefan Karlsson is a Professor of Molecular Medicine and Gene Therapy at the Lund Stem Cell Center, in the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Lund University, Sweden. He is recognized for significant contributions to the fields of gene therapy and hematopoietic stem cell biology and in 2009 was awarded the Tobias Prize by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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#15309

Michal Rivlin

#106696
Overall Influence
Michal Rivlin is a Senior Scientist and Sara Lee Schupf Family Chair in Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She was awarded the 2019 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists for her research on the neuronal circuitry of the retina.
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#15310

Astrid Linthorst

#177357
Overall Influence
Astrid Linthorst is a professor of neuroscience at the School of Clinical Sciences at the University of Bristol, UK. Specializing in the neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology of stress and behavior, she heads a research group on the mechanisms that support coping with stress in the brain. She is also chair of the Scientific Programme Committee of the ECNP Congress and a member of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Executive Committee.
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#15311

Anne Goriely

#178752
Overall Influence
Anne Goriely is a British geneticist who is a professor of human genetics at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates the molecular mechanisms that underpin genetic variation, particularly mutations in the male germline.
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#15312

Leslie R. Landrum

#182674
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Leslie Roger Landrum is an American botanist serving as senior research scientist at Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, and curator of the ASU Vascular Plant Herbarium. He attained M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, and has been at Arizona State University since 1986.
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#15313

Paul H. Taghert

#182681
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Paul H. Taghert is an American chronobiologist known for pioneering research on the roles and regulation of neuropeptide signaling in the brain using Drosophila melanogaster as a model. He is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis.
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#15314

Diane Kelly

#182366
Overall Influence
Diane Kelly is a Professor of Microbiology, Institute of Life Science, Swansea University Medical School and Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Career After undergraduate study in London, she undertook a PhD at Swansea University followed by postdoctoral work at the University of Sheffield, researching microbial cytochromes P450. After a position at Aberystwyth University she returned to Swansea University Medical School as Reader and then Professor. She continues to research sterol metabolism and microbial cytochromes P450 as targets for antifungal agents in medicine and agriculture, and has authored over fifty papers on these subjects.
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#15315

Caroline Palavicino-Maggio

#176495
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Caroline Palavicino-Maggio is an American neuroscientist and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She also directs the Neurobiological Mechanisms of Aggression Laboratory at McLean Hospital. Palavicino-Maggio explores how gene expression in amine neurons and neural circuits leads to changes in social behavior, specifically aggression. Palavicino-Maggio is committed to mentoring and inspiring first-generation students in STEM and serves as the Director of Outreach for the Journal of Emerging Investigators, an open-access journal that publishes research conducted by m...
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#15316

Nader Pourmand

#87223
Overall Influence
Nader Pourmand is a Professor of Biomolecular Engineering leading the Biosensors and Bioelectrical Technology Group at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz, Baskin School of Engineering.
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#15317

Pamela Templer

#115478
Overall Influence
Pamela H. Templer is an ecosystem ecologist and professor at Boston University who focuses on plant-microbial interaction and their effect on carbon exchange and nutrient cycling. She is also interested in examining how urban ecosystems function, how human actions influence nutrient cycling, atmosphere-biosphere interactions, and other ecosystem processes.
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#15318

Simon Rogers

#182718
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
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#15319

Tinde van Andel

#180467
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Tinde van Andel is an ethnobotanist. She is the Special professor of the Clusius chair of History of Botany and Gardens at Leiden University. Using ethnobotany and genomics, she studies how human populations and plant species migrated from Africa to the New World.
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#15320

Charles Mertens de Wilmars

#85896
Overall Influence
1921 - 1994 (73 years)
Charles Mertens de Wilmars was a Belgian psychiatrist. He graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1948, and became a licensed psychologist in 1949. He was taught neurology by Paul van Gehuchten and experimental psychology by Albert Michotte. He spent time at the Maudsley Hospital Medical School, funded by the British Council, after which he benefited from the bursary of the Belgian American Educational Foundation to travel to the United States to meet his colleagues in the field of psychiatric anthropology at Cornell University from 1949 to 1951. He was a visiting lecturer there in 1952, and w...
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#15321

Rebecca Johnson

#154659
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Rebecca Nicole Johnson is an Australian scientist and science communicator. Since April 2015, Johnson has been Director and Chief Scientist of the Australian Museum Research Institute , Sydney, the first female to be appointed to the role since the establishment of the Australian Museum in 1827. She is also head of the Australian Museum's Australian Centre for Wildlife Genomics, a wildlife forensics laboratory based at the Australian Museum.
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#15322

Deborah McGregor

#88416
Overall Influence
Deborah B. McGregor is a Canadian environmentalist. She is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice at Osgoode Hall Law School. Early life and education An Ojibway person from Whitefish River First Nation, McGregor was born in Birch Island, Ontario, to Elder Marion McGregor. She earned her PhD in Forestry from the University of Toronto.
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#15323

Yang Liu

#176676
Overall Influence
Yang Liu is a Chinese-American immunologist. He serves as director of the Division of Immunotherapy, Institute of Human Virology, University of Maryland Baltimore. Biography Liu was an associate research scientist at Yale School of Medicine, and then an assistant, and subsequently associate professor at the New York University Medical Center from 1992 to 1998. From 1998 to 2006, he was the Kurtz Chair Professor and the director of Division of Cancer Immunology, Department of Pathology, at the Ohio State University. From 2006 to 2012, he was the De Nancrede Professor and The director of Division of Immunotherapy in the department of surgery at the University of Michigan.
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#15324

Ofelia Olivero

#181377
Overall Influence
Ofelia Ana Olivero is an Argentine-American biologist specialized in HIV/AIDS and biomedical research. She pioneered the discovery of nucleoside analogs induced centrosomal amplification and aneuploidy while working as a senior staff scientist at the National Cancer Institute . In 2016, she became chief of the NCI diversity intramural workforce branch.
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#15325

Daniela M. Ferreira

#182421
Overall Influence
Daniela M. Ferreira is a Brazilian British immunologist. She is a specialist in bacterial infection, respiratory co-infection, mucosal immunology and vaccine responses. She is currently Professor of Respiratory Infection and Vaccinology at the Oxford Vaccine Group in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Oxford and the Director of the Liverpool Vaccine Group at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. She leads a team of scientists studying protective immune responses against pneumococcus and other respiratory pathogens such as SARS-CoV2. Her team has established a novel method of inducing pneumococcal carriage in human volunteers.
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#15326

Andrzej Pisera

#182441
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
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#15327

Louise Chilvers

#179416
Overall Influence
Barbara Louise Chilvers is a New Zealand marine biologist who researches marine mammals. She is Professor of Wildlife Ecology in the School of Veterinary Science at Massey University and Director of Wildbase Oiled Wildlife Response at the university.
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#15328

Kate Trinajstic

#171473
Overall Influence
Professor Kate Trinajstic or Katherine M. Trinajstic is an Australian palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and winner of the Dorothy Hill Award. She is the Dean of Research, Faculty of Science and Engineering at Curtin University.
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#15329

Valerie Saena Tuia

#101587
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Valerie Saena Tuia is a plant scientist from Samoa. She served as Officer in Charge of the Genetic Resources at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees for over 15 years, retiring in 2017.
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#15330

Terry Jones

#182871
Overall Influence
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#15331

Jeffrey A. Wilson

#182883
Overall Influence
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#15332

B. Lawrence Riggs

#182893
Overall Influence
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#15333

Janet McCarter Woolley

#110747
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Janet McCarter Woolley was an American bacteriologist. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1944, for her work in immunology. Early life and education Janet Ruth McCarter was born in 1906 in Duluth, Minnesota, the daughter of William and Mary Blackburn McCarter. She briefly attended Carleton College, and earned three degrees at the University of Wisconsin. As a doctoral student, she worked with professor E. G. Hastings on tubercule bacilli, which became the focus of her own work for decades.
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#15334

Helena Hansen

#106352
Overall Influence
Helena Hansen is an American psychiatrist and anthropologist who is a professor and Chair of Translational Social Science at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research considers health equity, and has called for clinical practitioners to address social determinants of health. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.
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#15335

Sally-Ann Poulsen

#171552
Overall Influence
Sally-Ann Poulsen is an Australian chemical biologist who is a Professor and Director at Griffith University. Her research considers medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. She is Chair of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology Division.
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#15336

Michael Weber

#182946
Overall Influence
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#15337

Jo-Anne Sewlal

#176400
Overall Influence
1979 - 2020 (41 years)
Jo-Anne Nina Sewlal was a Trinidad and Tobago arachnologist. She discovered several new species of spiders in Trinidad and Tobago, and published some of the first surveys of spider populations in many countries of the Caribbean.
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#15338

Yoshihiro Ogawa

#182954
Overall Influence
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#15339

Arthur M. Brown

#182956
Overall Influence
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#15340

R. Kerry Turner

#182958
Overall Influence
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#15341

Mary Barkworth

#178443
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Mary Elizabeth Barkworth is an American botanist and professor emerita at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Education and career Barkworth has a B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, and went on to teach school in British Columbia after graduation. She has an M.Ed. and a Ph.D. in 1975 from Western Washington University where she worked on variation in Brodiaea. Following her Ph.D. she worked with Agriculture Canada until moving to Utah State University in 1979, where she also served as the director of the Intermountain Herbarium. Barkworth retired in 2012.
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#15342

Matthew Johnson

#104329
Overall Influence
Matthew Johnson is a Reader in Biochemistry at the University of Sheffield, England. He was the 2018 recipient of the Biochemical Society’s Colworth Medal. Johnson is a plant biologist focusing on photosynthesis and respiration. Through his research and development, he has discovered "novel plastoquinone diffusion nanodomains facilitating electron transport between photosystem II and cytochrome b6f complexes in spinach thylakoid membranes." In 2016, he received the Society of Experimental Biology's President's Medals for his research on the molecular machinery of photosynthesis. This was regar...
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#15343

Bénédicte Menez

#84023
Overall Influence
Bénédicte Menez is a French geomicrobiologist and university professor in Earth Sciences at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. In 2012, she received the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize in the “Young Female Scientist” category for her work.
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#15344

Bastiaan Jacob Dirk Meeuse

#183004
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Bastiaan Jacob Dirk Meeuse was a botanist and naturalist.
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#15345

Elissa P. Benedek

#104634
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Elissa Panush Benedek is an American psychiatrist specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry and forensic psychiatry. She is an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical Center. She served as director of research and training at the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor for 25 years and was president of the American Psychiatric Association from 1990 to 1991. She is regarded as an expert on child abuse and trauma, and has testified in high-profile court cases. She also focuses on ethics, psychiatric aspects of disasters and terrorism, and domestic violence.
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#15346

Christy Morrissey

#180212
Overall Influence
Christy Ann Morrissey is a Canadian ecotoxicologist. She is a Professor of biology at the University of Saskatchewan and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
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#15347

Francesco Rossi

#183049
Overall Influence
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#15348

Rampa Rattanarithikul

#179628
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Rampa Rattanarithikul is a Thai entomologist and taxonomist. She is a leading expert on mosquitoes, having discovered 24 new species and identifying at least 420 during her career. She was the lead author of the six-volume Illustrated Keys to the Mosquitoes of Thailand. The mosquito species Anopheles rampae and Uranotaenia rampae are named for her.
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#15349

Robert Peter Gale

#183064
Overall Influence
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#15350

Rochelle Constantine

#181215
Overall Influence
Rochelle Lee Constantine is a New Zealand marine biologist, and is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Constantine specialises in marine mammal conservation. Academic career Constantine completed a PhD titled The behavioural ecology of the bottlenose dolphins of northeastern New Zealand: a population exposed to tourism at the University of Auckland in 2002. Constantine then joined the faculty, rising to full professor, and leader of the Marine Mammal Ecology Lab.
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