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,
#15551
Héctor S. Osorio
#140902
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Héctor Saúl Osorio Rial was a pediatrician, bacteriologist, and lichenologist from Uruguay. Osorio as a youth was keenly interested in natural science. He became a pediatrician and professional bacteriologist, but continued to pursue his avocation of field studies of nature, first in entomology and then in lichenology. He published over 90 scientific articles on the lichens of Uruguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil. At the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Montevideo, he was assistant director from 1971 to 1985, director from 1985 to 1997, and director emeritus and associate researcher from 1997 to 2016.
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R Lorraine Collins
#185077
Overall Influence
#15553
Curt Wittenberg
#133968
Overall Influence
Curt Wittenberg is an American biologist at Scripps Research Institute and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Kjell Ernst Viktor Ander
#126483
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Kjell Ernst Viktor Ander was a Swedish entomologist. Ander was admitted as Doctor of Philosophy at Lund University in 1939. Ander worked as a docent at Lund University from 1937 to 1951.
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Lauri Saag
#185054
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Lauri Saag is an Estonian geneticist, mycologist and lichenologist. As of 2023 he is associate professor of population genetics at the Estonian Biocentre. Career Saag studied botany, ecology and mycology at the University of Tartu between 1995 and 2002. He wrote his master's thesis on soredial crustose lichens in Estonia. From 2002 to 2008 he also did his doctorate there on taxonomic and ecological problems of the lichen genus Lepraria, and later continued working at the university as a research assistant. Saag also carries out human population genetics research, and has been a member of the ...
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Park Seong-hoe
#183327
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Seong Hoe Park is a Korean immunologist and pathologist and a distinguished professor of pathology at the Seoul National University College of Medicine. He served as the chair of the Department of Pathology , the chair of the Graduate Program of Immunology , the president of Center for Animal Resource Development at Seoul National University. He was the president of the Korean Association of Immunologists . Throughout his career as a T cell immunologist, Park established the theory of T cell-T cell interaction in human thymus, in which T cells expressing MHC class II drive previously unrecog...
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Raymond F. Palmer
#73137
Overall Influence
Raymond F. Palmer is an associate professor of family and community medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio , a post he has held since 2003. His area of expertise is biostatistics.
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Bin He
#185138
Overall Influence
#15559
Sarah Pett
#179585
Overall Influence
Sarah L. Pett is a Professor of Infectious Diseases at University College London. Pett is interested in the immunopathology of infections and the development of optimised treatment pathways for infections. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pett led a clinical trial that investigated the efficacy of remdesivir as a treatment for coronavirus disease.
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Kate Brauman
#175168
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Kate A. Brauman is an American scientist who uses an interdisciplinary tool set to examine the interactions between land use change and water resources. Brauman is the lead scientist for the Global Water Initiative at University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.
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Debra Waters
#181278
Overall Influence
Debra Lynn Waters is a New Zealand exercise physiologist and medical researcher in the field of health ageing, director of Gerontology Research and professor at the University of Otago. Academic career With a BS and PhD, exercise physiologist Waters moved from the University of New Mexico, where she retains the role of adjunct professor, to the University of Otago in New Zealand in 2005. In December 2019 Waters was promoted to full professor at the University of Otago with effect from 1 February 2020.
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Larry J. Young
#181804
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Larry J. Young is the William P. Timmie Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Medicine at Emory University. Dr. Young studies how genetic, cellular and neurobiological mechanisms regulate complex social behavior, including social cognition and social bonding. His research focuses heavily on the roles of the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin in regulating the neural processing of social signals and social attachment.
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Brian Gunning
#164739
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Brian Edgar Scourse Gunning FAA, FRS is an Australian biologist and Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University. Born on 29 November 1934, Gunning attended Methodist College Belfast and Queen's University Belfast.
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Kenneth Sverre Hagen
#130297
Overall Influence
1919 - 1997 (78 years)
Kenneth Sverre Hagen was an American professor of entomology at the University of California, Berkeley who was a specialist on the predators of sucking pests such as psyllids and aphids. He worked on approaches to integrated pest management based on the augmentation of natural predators and parasites and in the use of nutrient sprays to encourage them. He made breakthroughs in the mass-rearing of lacewings and ladybird beetles.
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Hajime Tei
#182138
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Hajime Tei is a Japanese neuroscientist specializing in the study of chronobiology. He currently serves as a professor at the Kanazawa University Graduate School of Natural Science & Technology. He is most notable for his contributions to the discovery of the mammalian period genes, which he discovered alongside Yoshiyuki Sakaki and Hitoshi Okamura.
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Pamela Marrone
#183330
Overall Influence
Pamela Marrone is a serial entrepreneur in agriculture biotechnology and biological pesticides. She is one of 22 women who founded and led companies to be listed on public stock exchanges She held more than 500 patents. She also serves on a number of company boards and is on serval advisory councils.
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Alonso Ramírez
#183903
Overall Influence
Luiz Alonso Ramírez Ulate is a Costa Rican ecologist and a professor at North Carolina State University. From 2020 to 2021 he served as president of the Society for Freshwater Science. Early life and education Ramírez grew up in Costa Rica and has stated that even as a child, he was "fascinated" with dragonflies. He attended the National University of Costa Rica as an undergraduate, performing research in stream ecology and writing a thesis about dragonfly nymphs. Ramírez conducted ecological fieldwork at the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, including during graduate school as a masters and doctoral student working with Catherine Pringle.
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Karin M. Kettenring
#184289
Overall Influence
Karin M. Kettenring is an American plant ecologist based in Logan, Utah. Her research focuses primarily on aspects of wetland plant ecology, including invasive plant ecology and management, native wetland seeds and seedlings, and wetland restoration. Kettenring worked in several labs and research stations across the United States before obtaining a faculty position at Utah State University as a professor of wetland ecology. Her most cited publication, “Lessons learned from invasive plant control experiments: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” looks at the literature discussing invasives s...
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Dori Laub
#37601
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Dori Laub was an Israeli-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a clinical professor in Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry, an expert in the area of testimony methodology, and a trauma researcher. A Holocaust survivor himself, Laub co-founded the Holocaust Survivorss Film Project with Laurel Vlock.
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Yuping Wu
#185305
Overall Influence
#15571
Paulina D. Jenkins
#185316
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Paulina D. Jenkins – active from the 1970s – is a British zoologist, specialising in mammals and employed as curator at the Natural History Museum, London. Jenkins has published research in a large number of papers, especially on smaller mammals such as shrews and bats. Her honours include the specific epithet derived from her first name for a species of rock rat found in Laos, Saxatilomys paulinae, prompting the invention of a common name "Paulina's rock rat". The mammalogist's surname is also the eponym of other animal names, the shrew-tenrec Microgale jenkinsae, and derived in the masculin...
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Gabriella Gibson
#182588
Overall Influence
Gabriella "Gay" Gibson FRES is a medical entomologist in the UK, she specialises in mosquitoes. In 2013 she was appointed Professor of Medical Entomology at the University of Greenwich. Education and career Gibson was educated at the University of Sussex where she studied a PhD looking at mosquito behaviour and was awarded the degree in 1981. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Silwood Park campus of Imperial College London and later a lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
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Robert E. Anderson
#185322
Overall Influence
#15574
Alan Garton
#184523
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
George Alan Garton FRS was a British biochemist, and Head of the Lipid Biochemistry Department, at the Rowett Research Institute, now part of the University of Aberdeen. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1978.
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Gregory Gibson
#185331
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Gregory C. Gibson is a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology , where he is also director of the Center for Integrative Genomics. Biography Gibson grew up in Canberra, Australia. He received his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Sydney in Australia in 1985, and his Ph.D. from the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1989. He was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan from 1994 to 1998, where he received a fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. In 1998, he joined the faculty of North Carolina ...
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Nicole Calakos
#184464
Overall Influence
Nicole Calakos is an American neuroscientist and neurologist. She is the Lincoln Financial Group Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. She is an elected Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Society for Clinical Investigation, and National Academy of Medicine for her "pioneering work in optogenetic approaches, and substantial contributions in the area of synaptic plasticity with a focus on striatal circuity of the basal ganglia."
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Piet L. C. M. Van Riel
#185360
Overall Influence
#15578
Kayri Havens
#149529
Overall Influence
Kayri Havens is an American botanist with expertise in reproductive ecology and rare, threatened, and endangered species conservation, including seed banking. She is the Medard and Elizabeth Welch Director of Plant Science and Conservation at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Havens is the co-director of Project Budburst, a community science project that facilitates the collection of plant phenology observations. In 2019, she was the recipient of the American Horticultural Society's Liberty Hyde Bailey Award for her achievements in plant conservation.
Go to Profile#15579
Mike Tildesley
#176290
Overall Influence
Michael J. Tildesley is Professor in Infectious disease modelling at the University of Warwick. He is a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group of SAGE. Education Born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, Tildesley went to school in the city of York and studied mathematics at Clare College, Cambridge. He read for his Ph.D. in 2003 with a thesis on Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics under the supervision of Nigel Weiss. He later moved to the University of Warwick and transitioned into the field of infectious disease modeling, a field he has worked in ever since.
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Emily Leproust
#182451
Overall Influence
Emily Leproust is an American scientist and entrepreneur. She is the CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience, a public company working on DNA synthesis. The company harnesses synthetic biology, providing tools to manufacture insulin from yeast, to tackle malaria, produce spider silk at scale or store information on DNA. She was awarded the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award in 2020.
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Hiroyuki Sasaki
#185392
Overall Influence
#15582
Andrew G. Campbell
#96365
Overall Influence
Andrew Garrett Campbell is an American biologist who is a professor of Medical Science and Dean of the Graduate School at Brown University. In 2020 he was named by Cell Press as one of the most 100 "inspiring Black scientists in America".
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Josephine Milne
#181126
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Josephine Milne is an Australian bryologist, and former Manager Collections at the National Herbarium of Victoria at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Education and career Milne completed a Bachelor of Education in Environmental Studies in 1978, with a double major in Biology and Geography. She then taught biology, science and geography for eleven years at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Secondary College, in Bentleigh, Melbourne. Following this, Milne tutored students in animal biology, genetics and human physiology at Deakin University, before beginning a PhD on the reproductive biology of f...
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Albrecht Manegold
#182698
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Albrecht Manegold is a German ornithologist and paleontologist. He is the curator of the vertebrate collection at the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe. He is known for contributions to the study of early passerine evolution. He has described extinct passerines and piciformes including the fossil treecreeper Certhia rummeli and the fossil woodpecker Australopicus nelsonmandelai.
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Yang Jun-Xing
#185450
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Yang Jun-Xing is a Chinese herpetologist and ichthyologist with the Kunming Institute of Zoology. As of 2018, Yang authored 9 species of fish and amphibians. Publications Description of a new subspecies of the genus Saurogobio Bleeker . Zoological Research , 23 : 306–310.A new species of catfish of the genus Clupisoma from the Salween River, Yunnan, China. Copeia 2005: 566–570.Clarification of the nomenclatural status of Gymnodiptychus integrigymnatus . 2008. Zootaxa, 1897: 67–68.A new species of the genus Sinocyclocheilus , from Jinshajiang Drainage, Yunnan, China. 2015. Cave Research, 1: 4.A new river loach from the main channel of the upper Mekong in Yunnan .
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Ann M. Hardy
#108788
Overall Influence
Ann Marie Hardy is an American epidemiologist and microbiologist who served as the human research protections officer at the National Institutes of Health Office of Extramural Programs. Education Ann Marie Hardy completed a master of science degree in microbiology and a doctor of public health in epidemiology in 1983 at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Her dissertation was titled Infections in renal transplant recipients receiving cyclosporine.
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Steve Jones
#185463
Overall Influence
#15588
Christine Van Broeckhoven
#185464
Overall Influence
#15589
Tanja Schwander
#185030
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Tanja Schwander is a Swiss evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Lausanne. She is known for her work on the Evolution of sexual reproduction. Education and career Tanja Schwander obtained her PhD in 2007 from the University of Lausanne on 'Evolution, maintenance and ecological consequences of genetic caste determination in Pogonomyrmex harvester ants'. Tanja Schwander then took a postdoctoral position at Simon Fraser University in Prof. Bernard J. Crespi's lab, before being hired as an independent researcher at the University of Groningen. In 2013, she moved back to Univer...
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Matthew J. DeGennaro
#180102
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Matthew DeGennaro is an American scientist who seeks to identify mosquito olfactory receptors used in human detection and formulate new volatiles that can effectively disrupt mosquito behavior. DeGennaro is credited with generating the first mutant mosquito utilizing zinc finger nucleases, and he is now working on formulating a “life saving perfume” that can deter these vectors for disease. He has been published in Nature, Developmental Cell, Current Biology, PLOS Genetics, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
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Oscar E. Liburd
#185481
Overall Influence
Oscar E. Liburd is a faculty member at University of Florida, Entomology and Nematology Department. Dr. Liburd has a Doctor of Philosophy in Entomology. He is developing environmentally sound insect pest management programs in fruit and vegetable systems for Florida and the southeastern US. Applied and basic research is performed in organic and conventional systems including blueberries, strawberries, grapes, blackberries, cucurbits, and cole crops. Areas of expertise include management of thrips, midges, mites, whiteflies, aphids, scale insects, flea beetles, mealybugs, lepidopteran pests and fruit flies.
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Liang Zhou
#185508
Overall Influence
#15593
Elizabeth Carrington Pope
#170799
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Elizabeth Carrington Pope was a New Zealand-born zoologist and marine biologist. She was born in Nelson in 1912, and migrated to Bellevue Hill, Australia with her family that same year. Pope was curator of worms and echinoderms at the Australian Museum, and was deputy director of the museum for one year before her retirement in 1972.
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Debashis Ghosh
#185513
Overall Influence
#15595
Ernest J. Harris
#180225
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Ernest James Harris was an American entomologist who is best known for his work on Biosteres arisanus, a species of wasp. He was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 1999. Early life and education Harris was born in North Little Rock, Arkansas. He was the youngest of six children, and grew up on a 45-acre cotton farm without access to electricity. Every year he missed school during the harvest to pick cotton, and would have to study by candlelight. He became interested in insects as a child. He was a student at Pulaski County Training School, which was segregated at the time, and graduated wanting to become an airplane mechanic.
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James Sodetz
#185523
Overall Influence
James M. Sodetz is an American biologist, focusing in biochemistry; protein chemistry, protein engineering, and molecular biology; structure-function studies of proteins and enzymes of blood with emphasis on the human complement system, currently the Carolina Distinguished Professor / Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University of South Carolina and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Renzo Canestrari
#72752
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Renzo Antonio Bartolomeo Canestrari was an Italian psychiatrist. A student of Giulio Cesare Pupilli and Cesare Musatti, he was one of the foremost pioneers in the rebirth of Italian psychology after World War II, as well as the founder of the Bologna School of Gestalt Psychology and the guiding force behind it for 40 years.
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Hagit Eldar-Finkelman
#184867
Overall Influence
Hagit Eldar-Finkelman is an Israeli scientist and a principal investigator of an active research laboratory at the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. Eldar-Finkelman’s research is focused on the signal transduction field and drug development targeting protein kinases. She is well known for her pioneering work on the functions of GSK-3 and its contribution to diabetes and other pathogenies, including depressive behavior, Alzheimer’s diseases, and Huntington’s diseases. Novel findings also include the unique evolution of GSK-3 isozymes. Eldar-Finkelman is a leading figure in dev...
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Anju Chadha
#60832
Overall Influence
Anju Chadha is an Indian biochemist. She is a professor at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. She works in the fields of biocatalysis and enzyme mechanisms, enzymes in organic synthesis, asymmetric synthesis using enzymes, chirotechnology, green chemistry and biosensors.
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John Sieburth
#183787
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
John McNeill Sieburth was a Canadian-born biologist. Sieburth spent his early career studying birds, then turned his attention to marine microorganisms. Sieburth was born on 2 September 1927 in Calgary, Alberta, and was raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. He graduated from University of British Columbia in 1949, subsequently earning a master's degree from Washington State University two years later, followed by a doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1955, after which he began his teaching career at Virginia Tech within the school's veterinary department. In completing his Ph.D., Sieburth studied turkeys.
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