Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1551

James I. Kirkland

#31003

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

James Ian Kirkland is an American paleontologist and geologist. He has worked with dinosaur remains from the south west United States of America and Mexico and has been responsible for discovering new and important genera. He named Animantarx, Cedarpelta, Eohadrosaurus , Jeyawati, Gastonia, Mymoorapelta, Nedcolbertia, Utahraptor, Zuniceratops, Europelta and Diabloceratops. At the same site where he found Gastonia and Utahraptor, Kirkland has also excavated fossils of the therizinosaur Falcarius.

#1552

Yoshiyuki Sakaki

#23433

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

is a Japanese molecular biologist. He was the sixth president of Toyohashi University of Technology and an emeritus professor of the University of Tokyo. Sakaki was born in Nagoya. He received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the University of Tokyo, and received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1971.

#1553

Elwyn L. Simons

#35871

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Elwyn LaVerne Simons was an American paleontologist, paleozoologist, and a wildlife conservationist for primates. He was known as the father of modern primate paleontology for his discovery of some of humankind's earliest antecedents.

#1554

James Brown

#37072

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

James Hemphill Brown is an American biologist and academic. He is an ecologist, and a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico. His work has focused on 3 distinct aspects of ecology: 1

#1555

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

#21268

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt was an Austrian ethologist in the field of human ethology. In authoring the book which bears that title, he applied ethology to humans by studying them in a perspective more common to volumes studying animal behavior.

#1556

Haim Sompolinsky

Haim Sompolinsky

#26834

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Haim Sompolinsky , is the William N. Skirball Professor of Neuroscience at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences , and a professor of physics at the Racah Institute of Physics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is also a visiting professor in the Center of Brain Science at Harvard University and the director of Harvard's Swartz Program in Theoretical Neuroscience. He is widely regarded as one of the leaders of theoretical neuroscience.

#1557

Eran Elhaik

#21670

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Eran Elhaik is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins owned by Enkigen Genetics Limited, registered in Ireland. His research uses computational, statistical, epidemiological and mathematical approaches to fields such as complex disorders, population genetics, personalised medicine, molecular evolution, genomics, paleogenomics and epigenetics.

#1558

Patrick Forterre

#46092

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Professor Patrick Forterre, born 21 August 1949 in Paris, is a French writer and researcher in biology. He is Head of the Department of Microbiology at the Pasteur Institute and is known for his work on Archaea, viruses and the evolution of life. Forterre was the first to use the abbreviation of "Last Universal Common Ancestor", or "LUCA", in a 1999 paper.

#1559

Nancy Kleckner

#44803

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Nancy Kleckner is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology at Harvard University and principal investigator at the Kleckner Laboratory at Harvard University. Education Nancy Kleckner worked with Matt Meselson as an undergraduate at Harvard University, earning her degree in 1968. She then moved on to do her PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with Ethan Signer on the genetics of lambda phage and DNA replication. She did a postdoc under David Botstein at Princeton University in 1974.

#1560

Christopher Field

#40688

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Christopher B. Field is an American scientist and researcher, who has contributed to the field of climate change. The author of more than 200 scientific publications, Field's research emphasizes impacts of climate change, from the molecular to the global scale. His work includes major field experiments on responses of California grassland to multi-factor global change, integrative studies on the global carbon cycle, and assessments of impacts of climate change on agriculture. Field's work with models includes studies on the global distribution of carbon sources and sinks, and studies on enviro...

#1561

Andrea Musacchio

Andrea Musacchio

#29705

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Andrea Musacchio is an Italian structural biologist. He is Max Planck director at the Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund. He is also Honorary Professor at the Center for Medical Biotechnology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He was named European Molecular Biology Organization member in 2009.

#1562

Kamaljit S. Bawa

Kamaljit S. Bawa

#37042

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Kamaljit Singh Bawa, FRS is an evolutionary ecologist, conservation biologist and a distinguished professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is also the founder of Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment . In 2012, Bawa received the first Gunnerus Sustainability Award, the world's major international award for work on sustainability. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.

#1563

Loren H. Rieseberg

#34802

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Loren H. Rieseberg is a Canadian-American botanist. Born in Alberta, Canada, his family moved to the US. He graduated from Washington State University with a Ph.D. in 1987. He is a Professor of Botany at the University of British Columbia and a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Indiana University, and head of the Rieseberg Lab. In October 2016, he was appointed the Director of the UBC Biodiversity Research Centre, replacing Sally Otto. He is on the editorial boards of numerous journals and has edited Molecular Ecology for many years.

#1564

James F. Crow

#51020

Overall Influence

#1565

Heini Hediger

#21344

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Heini Hediger was a Swiss biologist noted for work in proxemics in animal behavior and is known as the "father of zoo biology". Hediger was formerly the director of Tierpark Dählhölzli , Zoo Basel and Zürich Zoo .

#1566

Nick Talbot

#32656

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Nicholas José Talbot FRS FRSB is Group Leader and Executive Director at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich. Education Talbot was educated at Midhurst Grammar School. He went on to study at the University of Wales, Swansea for a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology graduating in 1986. Following his undergraduate degree, he trained at the University of East Anglia where he was awarded a PhD in 1990 for genetic and genomic analysis of the leaf mould Cladosporuim fulvum.

#1567

Natasha Raikhel

#46314

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Natasha V. Raikhel is a professor of plant cell biology at University of California, Riverside and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Early life and education Raikhel, the daughter of a surgeon and an X-Ray technician, grew up in Leningrad in the Soviet Union. From a young age, she was cultivated to become a concert pianist, until a teacher dissuaded her during her final year of high school from pursuing music as a career. After transferring to a regular high school from the music conservatory, she studied various sciences day and night, finally earning high enough scores to attend Leningrad State University to study invertebrae biology.

#1568

Peter R. Last

#37332

Overall Influence

Peter Robert Last is an Australian ichthyologist, curator of the Australian National Fish Collection and a senior principal research scientist at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart, Tasmania. He is an elasmobranch expert and has described many new species of shark.

#1569

Lewis Lanier

#51135

Overall Influence

Lewis L. Lanier is an immunologist who is an American Cancer Society Professor and the chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 2010, he has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He specializes on studying NK cells.

#1570

Dan J. Stein

#49074

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Dan Joseph Stein is a South African psychiatrist who is a professor and Chair of the Dept of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, and Director of the South African MRC Unit on Risk & Resilience in Mental Disorders. Stein was the Director of UCT's early Brain and Behaviour Initiative, and was the inaugural Scientific Director of UCT's later Neuroscience Institute. He has also been a visiting professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the United States, and at Aarhus University in Denmark.

#1571

Joel Mandelstam

#34983

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Joel Mandelstam FRS was a British microbiologist, a professor, at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He was a pioneer in using bacteria to study fundamental biological phenomena — such as development, differentiation, and the turnover of macromolecules — which had more usually been investigated in higher organisms.

#1572

Susan E. Evans

#35706

Overall Influence

Susan E. Evans is British palaeontologist and herpetologist. She is the author or co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. She received a BSc in Zoology at Bedford College in 1974, and in 1977 a PhD in vertebrate palaeontology from the University College London. In 1980 she was Assistant Professor in biology at the University College of Bahrain and went continued as a lecturer in Anatomy at Middlesex Hospital Medical School. She was also Senior Lecturer with the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at the University College, London In 2003, she became a Profess...

#1573

Antonio Giordano

#24718

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Antonio Giordano is an oncologist, pathologist, geneticist, researcher, professor and writer. A naturalized American from Italy, he is the Director of the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine in Philadelphia, and a professor of Anatomy and Pathological Histology at the Department of Medical Biotechnology of the University of Siena. He has discovered some key factors in the regulation of the cell cycle and of mechanisms linked to the onset of tumors. In particular, he distinguished himself for having isolated the tumor suppressor gene, the RB2/p130, subsequently demons...

#1574

Stephen B. Baylin

#46695

Overall Influence

Stephen Bruce Baylin is the deputy director and associate director for research at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research and medicine and chief of cancer biology of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focus is epigenetics in the development of cancer, and he was one of the first researchers in this field in the 1980s.

#1575

David Nutt

#3488

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

David John Nutt is an English neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in the research of drugs that affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety, and sleep. He is the chairman of Drug Science, a non-profit which he founded in 2010 to provide independent, evidence-based information on drugs. Until 2009, he was a professor at the University of Bristol heading their Psychopharmacology Unit. Since then he has been the Edmond J Safra chair in Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of Brain Sciences there. Nut...

#1576

Errol Friedberg

Errol Friedberg

#38484

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Errol Clive Friedberg was a biologist and historian of science in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University and subsequently the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Education He studied medicine at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and subsequently received postdoctoral training in biochemistry and pathology at Case Western Reserve University before joining the faculty at Stanford University.

#1577

Andreas Plückthun

Andreas Plückthun

#36624

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Andreas Plückthun is a scientist whose research is focused on the field of protein engineering. Andreas Plückthun is the director of the department of biochemistry at the University of Zurich. Plückthun was appointed to the faculty of the University of Zurich as a Full professor of biochemistry in 1993. Plückthun was group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry , Germany . He was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1992, and named a member of the German National Academy of Science in 2003. He is cofounder of the biotechnology companies Morphosys Molecular Partners AG and G7 Therapeutics.

#1578

Per Andersen

#32504

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

Per Oskar Andersen was a Norwegian brain researcher at the University of Oslo. Research by his lab, specifically by Terje Lømo , led to the discovery of long-term potentiation in 1966. He was a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Royal Society. He held honorary degrees at the University of Zürich and the University of Stockholm.

#1579

Jörg Hacker

#30549

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jörg Hinrich Hacker is a German microbiologist. He served as president of the Robert Koch Institute from 2008 to 2010 and of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina from 2010 to 2020. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Medical Microbiology.

#1580

Rick Kittles

#35077

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Rick Antonius Kittles is an American biologist specializing in human genetics and a Senior Vice President for Research at the Morehouse School of Medicine. He is of African-American ancestry, and achieved renown in the 1990s for his pioneering work in tracing the ancestry of African Americans via DNA testing.

#1581

Antonio Peña Díaz

#40749

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Antonio Peña Díaz is a Mexican biochemist who received the Carlos J. Finlay Prize for Microbiology and chaired both the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Mexican Society of Biochemistry . Peña Díaz holds a bachelor's degree in Medicine and both a master's and a doctorate degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico . He is currently an emeritus professor of the Institute for Cellular Physiology of the same university and has worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Rochester.

#1582

Noah Rosenberg

#22588

Overall Influence

Noah Aubrey Rosenberg is a geneticist working in evolutionary biology, mathematical phylogenetics, and population genetics, and is the Stanford Professor of Population Genetics and Society. His research focuses on mathematical modeling and statistical methods for genetics and evolution and he is the editor-in-chief of Theoretical Population Biology.

#1583

Charles Krebs

#45463

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Charles Joseph Krebs is a professor emeritus of population ecology in the University of British Columbia Department of Zoology. He is also Thinker-in-residence at the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra, Australia. He is renowned for his work on the fence effect, as well as his widely used ecology textbook Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance.

#1584

Michel Goedert

#23134

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michel Goedert FRS, FMedSci is a Luxembourgish-British neuroscientist and former Head of Neurobiology, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Goedert was born and raised in Luxembourg. After finishing his medical studies at the University of Basel in 1986, he started working at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology affiliated with the University of Cambridge.

#1585

Daniel Mazia

#46251

Overall Influence

1912 - 1996 (84 years)

Daniel Mazia was an American cell biologist, best known for his research that isolated the cell structures responsible for mitosis. His research was the gateway for many later discoveries about the cell cycle, cell division, and many other areas in cell biology.

#1586

Josep Penuelas

#50248

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Josep Penuelas or Josep Peñuelas i Reixach is a Catalan ecologist and researcher internationally recognized for his contributions in the fields of ecology and the environment. He was a student of Ramon Margalef.

#1587

Jane Gibson

#33855

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

Audrey Jane Gibson was a British-American microbiologist and biochemist who worked in the field of photosynthetic bacteria. She discovered that selenium is required by the metabolism of coliform bacteria and described a new species of sulphur bacterium in the genus Chloroherpeton. She became a Professor at Cornell University in 1979 and was editor of the scientific journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

#1588

David Hibbett

#44149

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

David Hibbett is an associate professor in biology at Clark University. He is considered one of today's leading researchers "in the analysis of fungal relationships through DNA analysis." At Clark he concentrates his lab work in evolutionary biology and ecology of Fungi.

#1589

Richard Prum

#28345

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Richard O. Prum is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist. He is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, as well as the head curator of vertebrate zoology at the university's Peabody Museum of Natural History. His 2017 book The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

#1590

Alexander Levitzki

Alexander Levitzki

#14206

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Alexander Levitzki is an Israeli biochemist who is a professor of biochemistry at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Birth and education Levitzki was born in 1940 in Palestine. He completed his M.Sc. in chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science, in 1968. From 1968 to 1971, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of California at Berkeley in California, with Professor Daniel E.

#1591

Eric j. Nestler

#51697

Overall Influence

#1592

David J. Anderson

#36312

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

David J. Anderson is an American neurobiologist. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. His lab is located at the California Institute of Technology, where he currently holds the position of Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology, TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Leadership Chair and Director, TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience. Anderson is a founding adviser of the Allen Institute for Brain Research, a non-profit research institute funded by the late Paul G. Allen, and spearheaded the Institute's early effort to generate a comprehensive map of gene expression in the m...

#1593

Michael Donoghue

#50801

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Michael Donoghue is an American evolutionary biologist, currently the Sterling Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and also a published author. Career Donoghue earned a bachelor's degree in Botany and Plant Pathology from Michigan State University in 1979. He attended Harvard University for his postgraduate work, attaining a Ph.D. in 1984. He found employment at San Diego State University from 1982 to 1985, the University of Arizona from 1985 to 1992, Harvard University from 1992 to 2000, and finally Yale University since 2000.

#1594

Peter Turchin

#2213

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Peter Valentinovich Turchin is a Russian-American complexity scientist, specializing in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics—mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies. He is currently Editor-in-Chief at Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution. , he is a director of the Evolution Institute.

#1595

Shubha Tole

#32463

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Shubha Tole is an Indian neuroscientist, professor and principal Investigator at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. Her research investigates the development and evolution of the mammalian brain. In 2014, she won the Infosys Prize in the Life Sciences category.

#1596

Jacques Glowinski

#51801

Overall Influence

#1597

David W. Tank

#33645

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David W. Tank is an American molecular biologist and neuroscientist who is the Henry L. Hillman Professor in Molecular Biology at Princeton University and the co-director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute along with psychology professor Jonathan Cohen.

#1598

Rodolfo Dirzo

#26600

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rodolfo Dirzo is a professor, conservationist, and tropical ecologist. He is a Bing Professor in environmental science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. His research interests mainly focus on plant-animal interactions, evolutionary ecology, and defaunation in the tropics of Latin America, Africa, and the Central Pacific. He was a member of the Committee on A Conceptual Framework for New K-12 Science Education Standards, co-authoring the framework in 2012, and continues to educate local communities and young people about science and environment...

#1599

Henri Ellenberger

Henri Ellenberger

#1169

Overall Influence

1905 - 1993 (88 years)

Henri Frédéric Ellenberger was a Canadian psychiatrist, medical historian, and criminologist, sometimes considered the founding historiographer of psychiatry. Ellenberger is chiefly remembered for The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970.

#1600

Derek R. Lovley

#51855

Overall Influence

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