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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#16101

David G. Armstrong

David G. Armstrong

#88200

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

David G. Armstrong is an American podiatric surgeon and researcher most widely known for his work in amputation prevention, the diabetic foot, and wound healing. He and his frequent collaborators, Lawrence A. Lavery and Andrew J.M. Boulton, have together produced many key works in the taxonomy, classification and treatment of the diabetic foot. He is Professor of Surgery with Tenure and director of the Southwestern Academic Limb Salvage Alliance at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and has produced more than 650 peer reviewed manuscripts and more than 110 b...

#16102

Cornelia B. Wilbur

#7505

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Cornelia Burwell Wilbur was an American psychiatrist. She is best known for a book, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and a television film, both titled Sybil, which were presented as non-fiction accounts of the psychiatric treatment she rendered to a person diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.

#16103

Xiaolin Wang

#190513

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

#16104

Temitayo Shokunbi

#190603

Overall Influence

Matthew Temitayo Shokunbi is a Nigerian Neurosurgeon and Professor of Anatomy. He got his MBBS degree at the University of Ibadan shortly after completing his A levels after which he started a residency program in Neurosurgery in Ontario, Canada. He is a lecturer in Anatomy at the University of Ibadan, and in Neurological surgery at the University College Hospital, Ibadan where he also doubles as a Honorary Consultant Neurosurgeon.

#16105

George Hill

#160964

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

George Darvel Hill was a New Zealand agronomist, naval reservist, and a justice of the peace and unionist. Early life and education Born in Wallsend, Northumberland, England on 16 June 1938, Hill was the son of a master mariner. He was educated at Christ Church Grammar School in Perth, Western Australia, from 1949 to 1956, and later completed a Master of Science in agriculture in at the University of Western Australia in 1969. The title of his master's thesis was Effect of environment on the growth of Leucaena leucocephala.

#16106

Tiina Randlane

#190611

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Tiina Randlane is an Estonian mycologist and lichenologist.

#16107

Qian Chen

#183245

Overall Influence

Qian Chen is a Chinese-American medical scientist who is currently the Michael G. Ehrlich Endowed Chair Professor in Orthopaedic Research at the Alpert Medical School, a part of Brown University.

#16108

Keith Holmes

#127384

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

William Brian Keith Holmes is an Australian palaeobotanist, best known for his work "Fructifications of Glossopteris" , published in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales. Despite having received no formal training in palaeontology, he has become an important contributor in the field and has described some 80 new species, mostly from 2 quarries at Nymboida in northern New South Wales, and situated on the Triassic.

#16109

Sarah Spiegel

#190249

Overall Influence

Sarah Spiegel is professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Virginia Commonwealth University . In the mid-1990s she discovered the sphingosine-1-phosphate molecule, a lipid which has been identified as a signaler for the spread of cancer, inflammation, and cardiovascular disease. Her research continues to focus on S1P.

#16110

Kenneth Burton

#118542

Overall Influence

1926 - 2010 (84 years)

Kenneth Burton FRS was a British biochemist, and Professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He was educated at High Pavement Grammar School , Wath Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge. When elected a Fellow of the Royal Society he was described as 'Distinguished for his contributions to knowledge of DNA structure and the mechanism of synthesis of bacteriophage nucleic acids.'

#16111

Lucile Hac

#98543

Overall Influence

1909 - 2006 (97 years)

Lucile Rose Hac was an American biochemist and microbiologist whose research interests included amino acids, antibiotics, and bone metabolism. She was director of research at International Minerals and Chemical Corporation and a faculty member in the biochemistry department at Northwestern University.

#16112

Alejandro Rico-Guevara

#190395

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Alejandro Rico-Guevara is an evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecophysicist. His scientific research has focused on nectar-feeding animals with an emphasis on hummingbird bill morphology and biomechanics. He is an assistant professor in the Biology Department at the University of Washington and Curator of Ornithology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

#16113

John G. White

#169295

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Graham White is an Emeritus Professor of Anatomy and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests are in the biology of the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and laser microscopy.

#16114

John S. Garth

#151306

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

John Shrader Garth was a 20th-century American naturalist and professor who specialized in marine crustaceans and butterflies. The crab genus Johngarthia is named for him. Early life and education John Garth was born in Los Angeles, California, on October 3, 1909, to a family that lived in nearby Long Beach. He graduated from Polytechnic High School in Long Beach in 1927. A skilled pianist, he earned a bachelor's degree in music at the University of Southern California in 1932. He was a member of the Yosemite School of Field Natural History and a temporary ranger naturalist at Glacier Nationa...

#16115

James W. Porter

#181830

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

James Watson Porter is an American ecologist. Porter was raised in Ohio, near Lake Erie, and graduated from Mercersburg Academy in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate and doctoral degree from Yale University in 1969 and 1973, respectively. Porter started his teaching career at the University of Michigan in 1972, and remained on the faculty until 1977, when he joined the University of Georgia faculty. Between 1977 and 1981, Porter was chief editor of the journals Ecology and Ecological Monographs. Porter held the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Professorship at the University of G...

#16116

John Garrow

#106507

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

John Stuart Garrow was a British nutritionist. He was the editor of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition from 1988 to 1999. Career Garrow was born in Dundee. He was formerly Professor of Human Nutrition, University of London, Honorary consultant physician St Bartholomew's Hospital, St Mark's Hospital, Royal London Hospital and Northwick Park Hospital.

#16117

Jennifer Mackinnon

#189036

Overall Influence

Jennifer Ann Mackinnon is an American physical oceanographer who has studied small-scale dynamical processes in oceans for more than 20 years. These processes include internal waves and ocean mixing, turbulence, sub-mesoscale instabilities, and their complex interaction. She is a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California, San Diego . Her research requires some fieldwork at sea to observe these processes.

#16118

Greg Hampikian

#35835

Overall Influence

Greg Hampikian is an American biologist and the founder and director of the Idaho Innocence Project. He is considered one of the foremost forensic DNA experts in the United States. Hampikian assisted in the establishment of various forensic evidence projects such as the Georgia Innocence Project, the Irish Innocence Project, and the Innocence Project France. He is currently a professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Criminal Justice at Boise State University. Hampikian is a DNA Expert on the Georgia Innocence Project Board. Hampikian is a New York Times contributing columnist w...

#16119

Tamily Weissman

#158901

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Tamily Weissman-Unni is a neurobiology professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon. She has published numerous studies on brain development and her current research focuses on formation of cerebellar circuits. Additionally, she has won several scientific imaging competitions for her striking multi-color pictures of the brain.

#16120

Nicola Shadbolt

Nicola Shadbolt

#190559

Overall Influence

Nicola Mary Shadbolt is a New Zealand farmer, academic and company director. She is currently a full professor at the Massey University and Chair of Plant & Food Research. Academic career Shadbolt earned degrees from the University of Nottingham and Lincoln College and a diploma from Massey University. Her master's thesis was titled Alternative management strategies and drafting policies for irrigated Canterbury sheep farms. Shadbolt worked at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and then in a variety of roles in government, agribusiness and consultancy before moving to Massey Universit...

#16121

Miriam Adhikari

#163568

Overall Influence

Miriam Adhikari is a physician and scientist specializing in paediatrics with a focus on neonatology. She is Emeritus Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a neonatologist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine. She also has a focus on paediatric nephrology and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.

#16122

Michael Brenner

#190807

Overall Influence

#16123

Carlos Lehnebach

Carlos Lehnebach

#190339

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Carlos Adolfo Lehnebach is a New Zealand botanist. He is employed as a botany curator at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Lehnebach has a master's degree and a PhD from Massey University.

#16124

Halijah Ibrahim

#185421

Overall Influence

Halijah Ibrahim is a Malaysian botanist. Ibrahim was awarded her doctorate by the University of Newcastle, UK in 1979. She is a professor at the Institute of Biological Sciences at the University of Malaya. She specialises in medicinal chemistry of Malaysian plants with particular interest in Zingiberaceae.

#16125

Jeremy Marchant

#184636

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Jeremy Neville Marchant is an English/American biologist and research animal scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service's Livestock Behavior Research Unit, based in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is also a past president and Honorary Fellow of the International Society for Applied Ethology.

#16126

Sally Stewart-Wade

#189629

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Dr. Sally Michelle Stewart-Wade is an Australian plant pathologist currently working as a Casual Professional at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Wade was born in 1969 in Sydney and completed her education at RMIT where she received a Bachelor of Applied Science in Applied Biology. She went on to complete her PhD at RMIT studying the "biological control of the weed thornapple." She has studied many aspects of weed control, as well as, fungal diseases on plants. Stewart-Wade has also reviewed the scientific literature twice for the nursery and garden industry ...

#16127

Piotr Węgrzynowicz

#190797

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

#16128

Robert Cabaj

#125349

Overall Influence

1948 - 2020 (72 years)

Robert Piotr Cabaj was an American psychiatrist, scholar and author, known for his extensive publications on LGBT mental health, including editing one of the early and influential textbooks in the field. He served as president of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists and of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association.

#16129

G. Philip Robertson

#182274

Overall Influence

G. Philip Robertson is an American biologist who is currently the University Distinguished Professor of Ecosystem Science at Michigan State University.

#16130

Yoram Yovell

#50364

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Yoram Yovell is an Israeli psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and brain researcher. He is an Associate Professor of the Practice at the Department of Medical Neurobiology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His areas of research include the neurobiology of emotions and mechanisms of physical and mental pain.

#16131

Daniel Oro

#190882

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Daniel Oro is a Spanish ecologist working as Professor of Research at CEAB-CSIC. Career Daniel Oro received his biology degree from the University of Barcelona in 1986, and his doctorate in biology from the same University in 1996. After his PhD, he completed post-doc research stays at CEFE-CNRS and University of Glasgow . During 2000-2016, he served as Professor at IMEDEA CSIC-University of the Balearic Islands, where he founded the Population Ecology Group. His research interests are in animal demography and population dynamics, as well as behavioural processes in social species.

#16132

Andres Aguilar

#190912

Overall Influence

#16133

Maria McNamara

#190388

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Maria Eithne McNamara is an Irish palaeontologist. She is Professor of Palaeobiology at University College Cork. McNamara's research focuses on the preservation of soft tissues in the fossil record, fossil colour, and feather evolution through the use of laboratory analytical techniques, including FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, SEM, TEM, synchrotron-XRF and XANES. Furthermore, controlled laboratory-based taphonomic experiments that simulate aspects of the fossilization process are done to illustrate how information on biological structures and chemistry is lost during decay and diagenesis, and help...

#16134

Thara Rangaswamy

#100131

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Thara Rangaswamy is a psychiatrist in India, the co-founder of an NGO called SCARF based in Chennai, India. She is a researcher in schizophrenia and community mental health. In 2020, she received the SIRS Outstanding Clinical and Community Research Award of SIRS , an apex body for work on schizophrenia in Florence, Italy.

#16135

Netha Hussain

#157947

Overall Influence

1990 - Present (36 years)

Netha Hussain is an India-born medical doctor and Wikipedian known for her efforts to tackle the spread of misinformation in Wikipedia about the origin of the coronavirus. Biography Hussain was born on 11 June 1990 in Kunnamangalam in the state of Kerala.

#16136

Tiit Land

#46154

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Tiit Land is an Estonian biochemist. From 1994 until 1999, Land worked as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in the United States. From 1999 until 2006, he was a researcher and lecturer at the Stockholm University's Neurochemistry Neurotoxicology Institute. From 2007 until 2011 he worked as a professor and chair of chemistry at Tallinn University's Department of Natural Sciences, Institute of Mathematics, and Natural Sciences. On 14 February 2011, Land was elected rector of Tallinn University. On 8 February 2016, he was re-elected for a second term.

#16137

Sushma Reddy

#190672

Overall Influence

Sushma Reddy is an Indian ornithologist, who serves as chair of ornithology at the Bell Museum of Natural History in the US state of Minnesota, having been made a fellow of the American Ornithological Society in 2018. She discovered one new species and two new genera of birds in the Western Ghats of India.

#16138

Michael N. Mautner

#85077

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Michael N. Mautner is a researcher in physical chemistry, astrobiology and astroecology. Education He received his B.Sc. from Hebrew University in 1966, his M. Sc. from Georgetown University in 1968, and his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1975.

#16139

Annamaria Torriani-Gorini

#170232

Overall Influence

1918 - 2013 (95 years)

Annamaria Torriani-Gorini was an Italian microbiologist best known for her work with bacterial alkaline phosphatase and bacterial physiology. Torriani-Gorini earned her Ph.D. in botany at the University of Milan. She worked at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, had a postdoctoral fellowship at the New York University School of Medicine, was a research associate at Harvard University, and became a professor at MIT. Torriani-Gorini advocated for social and economic justice and promoted women in science. She and her husband Luigi Gorini transformed a house in the Italian Alps into a home for Jewish ...

#16140

Wang Weiqi

#180095

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

Wang Weiqi was a Chinese biomedician who was a professor at Fudan University, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Biography Wang was born in Shanghai, on 30 May 1939, while his ancestral home in Haimen, Jiangsu. He attended Wusong High School. After graduating from Fudan University in 1961, he stayed at the university and worked successively as associate professor and full professor in 1988. On 26 August 2022, he died of an illness in Shanghai, at the age of 83.

#16141

Margaret E. Bradshaw

#184351

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (100 years)

Margaret Elizabeth Bradshaw is a long term advocate and recorder of the exceptional flora of Upper Teesdale in County Durham, UK. Her first book was published when she was 97. Early life and education Margaret Elizabeth Bradshaw was born in 1926 and lived with her family on a farm in East Yorkshire. She was interested in plants from childhood. She attended school in Bridlington and later in Leeds. After training as a teacher in Leeds, she taught in Derbyshire and then in Bishop Auckland.

#16142

David Ward

#101946

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

David J. Ward is a British palaeontologist. He worked for 14 years as a veterinary surgeon while being an amateur palaeontologist and taking part in several expeditions to Africa. In 1988 he retired from medicine to devote himself completely to palaeontology. He travelled extensively in Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as to Uzbekistan, Russia and Kazakhstan.

#16143

Maryam Jafarkhani Kermani

#191016

Overall Influence

Maryam Jafarkhani Kermani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Tissue and Cell Culture at the Administration of Agriculture and Biotechnology Research Institute of Iran . She is an Iranian scientist whose main research area is agricultural tissue culture and mainly studies plants in the Rosaceous family.

#16144

Lauren E. Hughes

#117490

Overall Influence

Lauren Elizabeth Hughes is an Australian carcinologist and curator. She specialises in the study of amphipods. Hughes graduated from the University of New England, Armidale with a PhD in 2007. Her thesis was titled "Biodiversity of Amphipods in the Solitary Islands New South Wales, Australia".

#16145

Amanda Reid

#100671

Overall Influence

Amanda "Mandy" Louise Reid is an Australian taxonomist and malacologist. She held the position of collection manager of malacology at the Australian Museum from 2010 to 2023. She is a published researcher and author. Her research has resulted in the description of many species of velvet worms and cephalopods.

#16146

Mark Boyce

#190902

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Mark Stephen Boyce is a professor of population ecology in the University of Alberta Department of Biological Sciences, and the Alberta Conservation Association Chair in Fisheries and Wildlife. Among other topics, he has written extensively on population viability analysis and resource selection functions. Early work was on demography and life history evolution. In 1993 he began research on habitat selection and the integration of habitats with population biology. He initiated research on elk in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 1977 and in 1988 was recruited by the National Park Service...

#16147

Donald Rix

#186468

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Donald Blake Rix, was a Canadian pathologist, philanthropist, community volunteer, and businessman. He was the founder and chair of MDS Metro Laboratory Services , the largest private medical laboratory in Western Canada.

#16148

Bruce Bennett

#191087

Overall Influence

#16149

Duan Shumin

#180586

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Duan Shumin is a Chinese neuroscientist. He completed his undergraduate and master's degrees at Bengbu Medical College, and his Ph.D from Kyushu University. Then he did his postdoctoral research at University of Hawaii and University of California, San Francisco. From 2000 to 2009 he served as a principal investigator in Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was elected a member of CAS in 2007, and of TWAS in 2008.

#16150

Daniel E. Singer

#191097

Overall Influence

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