Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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

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

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1601

Wilfrid Rall

#18586

Overall Influence

1922 - 2018 (96 years)

Wilfrid Rall was a neuroscientist who spent most of his career at the National Institutes of Health. He is considered one of the founders of computational neuroscience, and was a pioneer in establishing the integrative functions of neuronal dendrites. Rall developed the use of cable theory in neuroscience, as well as passive and active compartmental modeling of the neuron.

#1602

Kai Simons

#51744

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Kai Simons is a Finnish professor of biochemistry and cell biology and physician living and working in Germany. He introduced the concept of lipid rafts, as well as coined the term trans-Golgi network and proposed its role in protein and lipid sorting. The co-founder and co-organizer of EMBO, ELSO, Simons initiated the foundation of MPI-CBG, where he acted as a director and a group-leader . He is the co-founder and co-owner of Lipotype GmbH.

#1603

Michael Kotlikoff

#24195

Overall Influence

Michael I. Kotlikoff is an American biomedical researcher, academic leader, and veterinarian who has served as the provost of Cornell University. His work on cardiovascular biology, optogenetics, mouse genetics, and ion channel function has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1986. He has served on numerous NIH panels, including chair of the Scientific Board of Councillors of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the NIH Council of Councils, as well as national and international Higher Education committees, including Chair of the Jacobs Technion-Cor...

#1604

Masayasu Nomura

#47420

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

Masayasu Nomura was a Japanese molecular biologist. Nomura was born in April 1927, a native of Hyōgo Prefecture, and completed a bachelor's degree and doctorate at the University of Tokyo. Nomura began work in 1957 as a postdoctoral researcher in the United States, alongside Sol Spiegelman, James Watson, and Seymour Benzer. Nomura returned to Japan in 1960, to teach at the Osaka University Institute of Protein Research. Three years later, Nomura accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was named a full professor in 1966, and remained on the faculty until 1984, when he moved to the University of California, Irvine as Grace Bell Professor of Biological Chemistry.

#1605

Barry Sears

#20639

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Barry Sears is an American biochemist and author best known for creating and promoting the Zone diet, a low-carbohydrate fad diet that is not supported by good medical evidence. Biography As stated in several of his books, the Zone diet was born of his desire to avoid an early death from a premature heart attack, a fate of which all other men in his family had been early victims. In more recent years, Sears has popularized the use of high-dose Omega-3 fatty acids and polyphenols to further reduce inflammation. He began studying lipids primarily because their difficulty to study made them an u...

#1606

Herbert Henri Jasper

#51949

Overall Influence

#1607

Max Essex

#26943

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Myron Elmer "Max" Essex is the Mary Woodard Lasker Professor of Health Sciences, emeritus in the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard University, chair of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health AIDS Initiative in the department of immunology and infectious diseases, and chair of the Botswana–Harvard AIDS Institute in Gaborone, Botswana. Essex was one of the first to link animal and human retroviruses to immunosuppressive disease, to suspect that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS, and to determine that HIV could be transmitted through blood and blood products to hemophiliacs and recipients of blood transfusions.

#1608

Lincoln Stein

#34772

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Lincoln David Stein is a scientist and Professor in bioinformatics and computational biology at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Education Stein completed a Doctor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a PhD in Cell Biology at Harvard University both in 1989 via the MD-PhD program. His thesis investigated gene cloning in Schistosoma mansoni.

#1609

Frank L. Graham

#35778

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Frank L. Graham is a Canadian biologist, having been a Distinguished University Professor at McMaster University. Graham is the 1998 recipient of the Robert L. Noble Prize. Graham has performed research on gene therapy.

#1610

Barry Bloom

#31861

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Barry R. Bloom is Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Department of Global Health and Population in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, where he served as dean of the faculty from 1998 through December 31, 2008.

#1611

Madhav Gadgil

#13235

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil is an Indian ecologist, academic, writer, columnist and the founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, a research forum under the aegis of the Indian Institute of Science. He is a former member of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India and the Head of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel of 2010, popularly known as the Gadgil Commission.

#1612

Paul Zamecnik

#29923

Overall Influence

1912 - 2009 (97 years)

Paul Charles Zamecnik was an American scientist who played a central role in the early history of molecular biology. He was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Zamecnik pioneered the in vitro synthesis of proteins and helped elucidate the way cells generate proteins. With Mahlon Hoagland he co-discovered transfer RNA . Through his later work, he is credited as the inventor of antisense therapeutics. Throughout his career, Zamecnik earned over a dozen US patents for his therapeutic techniques. Up until his death in 200...

#1613

Charles N. Serhan

#31438

Overall Influence

Charles Nicholas Serhan is the Simon Gelman Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and a Professor of Oral Medicine, Infection and Immunity at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Serhan is the Director of the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Reperfusion Injury at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

#1614

Graham Budd

#33280

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Graham Edward Budd is a British palaeontologist. He is Professor and head of palaeobiology at Uppsala University. Budd's research focuses on the Cambrian explosion and on the evolution and development, anatomy, and patterns of diversification of the Ecdysozoa, a group of animals that include arthropods.

#1615

Michael Levine

#42567

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Michael Levine is an American developmental and cell biologist at Princeton University, where he is the Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and a Professor of Molecular Biology.

#1616

Roger N. Beachy

Roger N. Beachy

#41080

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Roger N. Beachy is an American biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences who studies plant virology. He was the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri, and the first director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

#1617

Anders Krogh

#36872

Overall Influence

Anders Krogh is a bioinformatician at the University of Copenhagen, where he leads the university's bioinformatics center. He is known for his pioneering work on the use of hidden Markov models in bioinformatics , and is co-author of a widely used textbook in bioinformatics. In addition, he also co-authored one of the early textbooks on neural networks. His current research interests include promoter analysis, non-coding RNA, gene prediction and protein structure prediction.

#1618

Albert Jacquard

Albert Jacquard

#11059

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Albert Jacquard was a French geneticist, popularizer of science and essayist. He was well known for defending ideas related to science, degrowth, needy persons and the environment. He was 10 years an active member of the French communist party .

#1619

Irun Cohen

#25435

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Irun Cohen is an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He moved from the U.S. to Israel in 1968. His contributions to immunology includes, in 1989, the development of the theory of the immunological homunculus, a hypothetical self-image used by the immune system to govern its responses. The bulk of Professor Cohen's work is in the search for treatment for autoimmune disease. Throughout his career he has collaborated with scientists of all nationalities, including the Cuban immunologist Enrique Montero. Cohen is currently the Israeli scientist with the second largest numb...

#1620

Roger M. Enoka

#37753

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Roger Maro Enoka is professor and former chair of the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is also the director of the Neurophysiology of Movement Lab. According to Web of Knowledge, Professor Enoka has 232 published items, which have been cited a total of 9,254 times . His most frequently cited paper is titled "Neurobiology of Muscle Fatigue". Professor Enoka has an h-index of 51 as of November 10, 2014.

#1621

Laurence Zitvogel

#33380

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Laurence Zitvogel is a French physician specializing in oncology and immunology with a large research experience in exosomess and the biological impact of those structures in malignant neoplasms. Personal life Laurence Zitvogel was born in Suresnes, France on 25 December 1963. She has worked with her spouse, Guido Kroemer, since 2001.

#1622

Graham Collingridge

#41486

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Graham Leon Collingridge is a British neuroscientist and professor at the University of Toronto and at the University of Bristol. He is also a senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

#1623

Simon Fisher

#19871

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Simon E. Fisher is a British geneticist and neuroscientist who has pioneered research into the genetic basis of human speech and language. He is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Professor of language and genetics at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

#1624

John Carbon

#30076

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

John A. Carbon is a professor emeritus of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography He earned his B.S. degree in chemistry in 1952 at the University of Illinois, and his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry in 1955 from Northwestern University. He did basic research developing new anticancer drugs at Abbott Laboratories for 12 years . He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1968, and became professor emeritus in 1999. His research contributions include elucidation of the mechanism of genetic missense suppression in bacte...

#1625

Gene D. Block

#27282

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Gene David Block is an American biologist who has served as the current and 6th chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles since August 2007. Block has served as provost and professor of biology at the University of Virginia. While at the University of Virginia, Block interacted with Randy Pausch and is mentioned in his memoir, The Last Lecture.

#1626

Robert S. Dietz

Robert S. Dietz

#12401

Overall Influence

1914 - 1995 (81 years)

Robert Sinclair Dietz was a scientist with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. Dietz, born in Westfield, New Jersey, was a marine geologist, geophysicist and oceanographer who conducted pioneering research along with Harry Hammond Hess concerning seafloor spreading, published as early as 1960–1961. While at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography he observed the nature of the Emperor chain of seamounts that extended from the northwest end of the Hawaiian Island–Midway chain and speculated over lunch with Robert Fisher in 1953 that something must be carrying these old volcanic mountai...

#1627

Robert C. Stebbins

Robert C. Stebbins

#23309

Overall Influence

1915 - 2013 (98 years)

Robert Cyril Stebbins was an American herpetologist and illustrator known for his field guides and popular books as well as his studies of reptiles and amphibians. His Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians, first published in 1966, is still considered the definitive reference of its kind, owing to both the quality of the illustrations and the comprehensiveness of the text. A professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, for over 30 years, he was the first curator of herpetology at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, a 1949 Guggenheim fellow, and author of over 70 scientific articles.

#1628

Joaquin Fuster

#12224

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Joaquin M. Fuster is a Spanish neuroscientist whose research has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of the neural structures underlying cognition and behavior. His several books and hundreds of papers, particularly on memory and the prefrontal cortex, are widely cited.

#1629

Hidesaburo Hanafusa

#12227

Overall Influence

1929 - 2009 (80 years)

Hidesaburo Hanafusa was a Japanese virologist. He shared the 1982 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Harold E. Varmus and J. Michael Bishop for demonstrating how RNA tumor viruses cause cancer, and elucidating their role in combining, rescuing and maintaining oncogenes in the viral genome.

#1630

Davor Solter

#37386

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Davor Solter is a Yugoslavian-born developmental biologist, particularly known for his pioneering work on mammalian genomic imprinting. He is Emeritus Member and Director, Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics; Visiting International Professor, Siriraj Center for Excellence in Stem Cell Research, Mahidol University, Thailand; and Visiting Professor, University of Zagreb Medical School.

#1631

Catherine Verfaillie

#17452

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Catherine M. Verfaillie obtained an M.D. from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1982. After graduation, she specialized in internal medicine and in 1987. Currently she works as a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven . Her work on the ability of adult stem cells to differentiate to different cell types has garnered controversy due to accusations of poor laboratory practices and fabrication of data by members of her laboratory. In 2019, it was shown that several of her more recent papers also contained altered images and potential fraud was committed.

#1632

Junichiro Itani

#17294

Overall Influence

1926 - 2001 (75 years)

Junichiro Itani was a Japanese anthropologist who served as a professor emeritus at Kyoto University and as president of the Primate Society of Japan. He is considered a founder of the discipline of Japanese primatology. He died at age 75 of pneumonia. As with most Japanese primatologists, his early research was on Japanese macaques , but most of his career focused on African primates, especially chimpanzees . He started research in Africa in 1958. The majority of his work was based around the social structures of primate society.

#1633

Martin J. Fettman

Martin J. Fettman

#23589

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Martin Joseph Fettman is an American pathologist and researcher who flew on NASA Space Shuttle mission STS-58 aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia as a Payload Specialist. Personal data Born December 31, 1956, Brooklyn, New York. Married to Heather Connally DVM MS DACVECC. Recreational interests include scuba diving, amateur radio, flying, bicycling, pistol marksmanship, camping and mountain hiking, photography, travel, reading , and music . His mother, Mrs. Elaine Fettman Peck, resides in Brooklyn, New York, with his stepfather, Mr. Harold Peck. His father, Mr. Bernard P. Fettman, is deceased.

#1634

Helen Hobbs

#27600

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Helen Haskell Hobbs is an American medical researcher who is professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, who won a 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2018 Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine. She and Jonathan C. Cohen found that people with hypomorphic PCSK9 mutations had lower LDL-cholesterol levels and were almost immune to heart disease. This finding led to the development of a new class of cholesterol-lowering drugs that mimic the effects of the PCSK9 mutations. She and Cohen also identified t...

#1635

Alexander Rudensky

Alexander Rudensky

#34966

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Alexander Rudensky is an immunologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center known for his research on regulatory T cells and the transcription factor Foxp3. Career Rudensky received his Candidate of Sciences degree in 1986 from the Gabrichevsky Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, Moscow, and completed his postdoctoral work at the Yale School of Medicine. He is now the Chair of the Immunology Program and Director of the Ludwig Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering, as well as a professor at the Rockefeller University, Cornell University, Gerstner School of Graduate Studies, a...

#1636

Darrel Frost

#33554

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Darrel Richmond Frost is an American herpetologist and systematist. He was previously head curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, as well as president of both the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists . Four taxa are named in his honor: the toad genus Frostius , the tree frog Dendropsophus frosti, Darrel's Chorus Frog Microhyla darreli, and Frost's arboreal alligator lizard Abronia frosti.

#1637

Douglas Kell

#32618

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Chief Sci Douglas Bruce Kell is a British biochemist and Research Professor of Systems Biology in the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool, and a Co-founder of Epoch Biodesign Ltd. He was previously at the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester, based in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology . He founded and led the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology. He served as chief executive officer of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council from 2008 to 2013.

#1638

Robin Murray

#33067

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Sir Robin MacGregor Murray FRS is a Scottish psychiatrist, Professor of Psychiatric Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. He has treated patients with schizophrenia and bipolar illness referred to the National Psychosis Unit of the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust because they fail to respond to treatment, or cannot get appropriate treatment, locally; he sees patients privately if they are unable to obtain an NHS referral.

#1639

Ziheng Yang

#49216

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Ziheng Yang FRS is a Chinese biologist. He holds the R.A. Fisher Chair of Statistical Genetics at University College London, and is the Director of R.A. Fisher Centre for Computational Biology at UCL. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.

#1640

Joel Rosenbaum

#39759

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Joel Rosenbaum is a professor of cell biology at Yale University. Rosenbaum received his bachelor's degree from Syracuse University in 1955, and later his M.Sc. Ed. from St. Lawrence University in 1957. He returned later to Syracuse for his master's degree in 1959 and Ph.D. in 1963.

#1641

Gebisa Ejeta

#12181

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gebisa Ejeta is an Ethiopian American plant breeder, geneticist and Professor at Purdue University. In 2009, he won the World Food Prize for his major contributions in the production of sorghum. Early years Ejeta was born in the remote village Wollonkomi, Ethiopia to Oromo parents. Encouraged by his mother, he walked 20 kilometres to the nearest elementary school every Sunday evening and spend the week there.

#1642

Nick Matzke

#31339

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Nicholas J. Matzke is the former Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education and served an instrumental role in NCSE's preparation for the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial. One of his chief contributions was discovering drafts of Of Pandas and People which demonstrated that the term "intelligent design" was later substituted for "creationism". This became a key component of Barbara Forrest's testimony. After the trial he co-authored a commentary in Nature Immunology, was interviewed on Talk of the Nation, and was profiled in Seed as one ...

#1643

James H. Schwartz

#21441

Overall Influence

1932 - 2006 (74 years)

James H. Schwartz was an American neurobiologist and professor at Columbia University in New York City. He was a co-editor, with Eric R. Kandel and Thomas Jessell, of the well-known textbook Principles of Neural Science. His research focused on explaining the biochemical basis of learning and memory and focused on the origins of learning and animal behaviors at the cellular and molecular level.

#1644

Jesper Mogensen

#21575

Overall Influence

Jesper Mogensen was a Danish neuroscientist who worked as a professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Psychology, and was the founder and head of The Unit for Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Research Centre for Brain Injury Rehabilitation .

#1645

Gillian Griffiths

#43246

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Gillian Griffiths, FMedSci FRS is a British cell biologist and immunologist. Griffiths was one of the first to show that immune cells have specialised mechanisms of secretion, and identified proteins and mechanisms that control cytotoxic T lymphocyte secretion. Griffiths is Professor of Cell Biology and Immunology at the University of Cambridge and is the Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.

#1646

Janet Kelso

#48136

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Janet Kelso is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans with those of the present .

#1647

Mitsuhiro Yanagida

#24393

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

is a Japanese molecular biologist known for research on cell cycle and chromosome structure using the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. He was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society on 11 May 2000.

#1648

Roel Nusse

#39159

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Roeland "Roel" Nusse is a professor at Stanford University and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research was seminal in the discovery of Wnt signaling, a family of pleiotropic regulators involved in development and disease.

#1649

Edward M. De Robertis

Edward M. De Robertis

#38812

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Edward Michael De Robertis is an American embryologist and Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has contributed to the finding of conserved molecular processes of embryonic inductions that result in tissue differentiations during animal development. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, worked for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for 26 years, and holds a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI appointed De Robertis to a lifetime position in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2...

#1650

Jian Zhou

#28149

Overall Influence

1957 - 1999 (42 years)

Jian Zhou was a Chinese virologist and cancer researcher, who with fellow researcher Ian Frazer, invented Gardasil and Cervarix, the vaccines for stimulating human immunological resistance to the cervical cancer-inducing human papilloma virus.

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