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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#16351

Max Pfannenstiel

1902 - 1976 (74 years)

Max Joseph Jakob Pfannenstiel was a German geologist, palaeontologist and librarian who spent some years in Turkey due to being classified as a 2nd-degree mixed-Jew during the early part of the Nazi regime.

#16352

Boris Babkin

1877 - 1950 (73 years)

Boris Petrovitch Babkin FRS, M.D., D.Sc, LL.D was a Russian-born physiologist, who worked in Russia, England and Canada. Career Babkin graduated from the Military Medical Academy, St. Petersburg, with a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1904. He held professorships at the Novo-Alexandria Agricultural Institute and the University of Odessa, before being imprisoned and exiled from Russia in 1922, due to his criticism of the October Revolution.

#16353

Nils Jerlov

1909 - 1990 (81 years)

Nils Gunnar Jerlov was a Swedish oceanographer, physicist, scientist, and researcher who studied how light interacts with water. He was a pioneering scientist in the field of ocean optics, and his water types are used to define the color and characteristics of natural water bodies.

#16354

Abraham Brill

1874 - 1948 (74 years)

Abraham Arden Brill was an Austrian-born psychiatrist who spent almost his entire adult life in the United States. He was the first psychoanalyst to practice in the United States and the first translator of Sigmund Freud into English.

#16355

Tom Harris

1903 - 1983 (80 years)

Professor Thomas Maxwell Harris FRS was an English paleobotanist. Education and career He was educated at Bootham School, York, Wyggeston School, Leicester, and University College, Nottingham, before continuing to complete his doctorate at Christ's College, Cambridge.

#16356

Elizabeth McCoy

1903 - 1978 (75 years)

Elizabeth McCoy was an American microbiologist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early life Elizabeth McCoy was born in Madison, Wisconsin, February 1, 1903. McCoy’s fascination with microbiology began early on the family farm where she lived with her family. Her parents, Esther Williamson and Cassius James McCoy, both attended college. Her mother was a professor and then an active practicing nurse for six years. McCoy's mother taught her about household hygiene and techniques to best preserve food. Her father was a professor but for health reasons had to retire.

#16357

Conrad Vernon Morton

1905 - 1972 (67 years)

Conrad Vernon Morton was an American botanist, who did notable writings on Ferns. He was also a specialist in Gesneriaceae and Solanaceae for the Smithsonian Institution from 1928. In 1938, botanists Standl. & Steyerm., published Mortoniodendron, a genus of flowering plants from Central America, belonging to the family Malvaceae in Conrad Morton's honour. Then in 1939, botanist Robert Everard Woodson published Mortoniella a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Central America, in the family Apocynaceae, also in his honour. Later in 1975, botanist Wiehler published Neomortonia, a genus of ...

#16358

John Macleod

1876 - 1935 (59 years)

John James Rickard Macleod, , was a Scottish biochemist and physiologist. He devoted his career to diverse topics in physiology and biochemistry, but was chiefly interested in carbohydrate metabolism. He is noted for his role in the discovery and isolation of insulin during his tenure as a lecturer at the University of Toronto, for which he and Frederick Banting received the 1923 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. Awarding the prize to Macleod was controversial at the time, because according to Banting's version of events, Macleod's role in the discovery was negligible. It was not until d...

#16359

Myron Gordon

1899 - 1959 (60 years)

Myron Gordon was an American biologist and geneticist and became an expert on platy fish Xiphophorus while using them for his pioneering cancer research, starting in the late 1920s. Early papers were published while still a graduate student at Cornell University, but he is best known for his research at New York University and the New York Zoological Society .

#16360

Jordi Folch Pi

1911 - 1979 (68 years)

Jordi Folch Pi was a Spanish biochemist at Harvard University who was recognized universally as one of the founders of the field of structural chemistry of complex lipids and as a leader in the development of Neurochemistry , as a distinct discipline within the Neurosciences.

#16361

Marston Bates

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

Marston Bates was an American zoologist and environmental author. Bates' studies on mosquitoes contributed to the understanding of the epidemiology of yellow fever in northern South America. Born in Michigan, Bates received a BS in biology from the University of Florida in 1927. From 1928 to 1931, he worked as an entomologist for the United Fruit Company in Central America. He received a PhD in zoology in 1934 from Harvard University. He worked for the Rockefeller Foundation from 1935 to 1952, studying mosquito ecology, malaria, yellow fever, and human population. He lived for many years in Villavicencio between the mountains and the llanos in central Colombia.

#16362

F. E. J. Fry

1908 - 1989 (81 years)

Frederick Ernest Joseph Fry was a Canadian ichthyologist and aquatic ecologist. He is known for his early research in physiological ecology and population dynamics in fishes. In the late 1940s, he became the first scientist to model how environmental factors affect the activity of fish. He was a 1959 Guggenheim Fellow, and served as president of several organizations including the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography American Fisheries Society and American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists .

#16363

Cornelis Gijsbert Gerrit Jan van Steenis

1901 - 1986 (85 years)

Cornelis Gijsbert Gerrit Jan van Steenis was a Dutch botanist. Van Steenis wrote many publications on the flora of the Maritime Southeast Asia region, among others about taxonomy and plant geography. Besides his expeditions in the Malay region, he also traveled in Australia and New Zealand.

#16364

Claude W. Hibbard

1905 - 1973 (68 years)

Claude William Hibbard, popularly known as Hibbie , was an American paleontologist. Born on a farm in rural southeastern Kansas as the oldest of six children, Hibbard graduated from Fall River High School in 1923. He attended Emporia State Teaching College in Emporia, Kansas, during the summer and the following autumn became principal of a school in Thrall, Kansas.

#16365

Cecil Edmund Yarwood

1908 - 1981 (73 years)

Cecil Edmund Yarwood was an American-Canadian plant pathologist whose work focused on obligate parasites of plants, viruses, and conditions that predisposed plants to infections. He is considered an authority on rust and powdery mildew.

#16366

Hans Gaffron

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Dr. Hans Gaffron was born in Lima, Peru, on May 17, 1902, and was a son of the German physician Eduard Gaffron and his wife Hedwig von Gevekot. He was one of the earlier researchers trying to elucidate the mechanistic and biochemical details of photosynthesis and plant metabolism. His most notable finding was the discovery of a process whereby unicellular green algae can produce molecular Hydrogen in the presence of light, and that the precursors were derived from photosynthetic water-splitting. Applications based on his work have led to many efforts to develop H2 as a renewable biofuel.

#16367

Francis Gilman Blake

1887 - 1952 (65 years)

Francis Gilman Blake was a leading American immunologist. He served as dean of the Yale University School of Medicine, president of the American Association of Immunologists, and physician-in-chief of the Yale–New Haven Hospital.

#16368

William Skinner Cooper

1884 - 1978 (94 years)

William Skinner Cooper was an American ecologist. Cooper received his B.S. in 1906 from Alma College in Michigan. In 1909, he entered graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he studied with Henry Chandler Cowles, and completed his Ph.D. in 1911. His first major publication, "The Climax Forest of Isle Royale, Lake Superior, and Its Development" appeared in 1913.

#16369

Martin Gerard Rutten

1910 - 1970 (60 years)

Martin Gerard Rutten was a Dutch geologist, paleontologist, and biologist. He worked as a professor of geology at the universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht. Rutten was born in Jombang, Indonesia to geologist Louis Martin Robert and biologist Johanna Catharina Pekelharing. He joined the Dutch Youth Association for Nature Study and took an early interest in birds and published briefly on birds observed during his later travels. Like his father, who was a geologist in the oil industry, he took an interest in geology and natural history travelling around the world. He studied at the University of...

#16370

Harold Macy

1895 - 1986 (91 years)

Harold Macy was an American microbiologist, specializing in bacteria and dairy. A native of Hudson, New York born in 1895, Macy graduated from Cornell University in 1917. He worked two years for the American Red Cross, and also served in the United States Army during World War I. In 1919, Macy joined the University of Minnesota faculty. Ten years later, he earned a doctorate from Iowa State College. Macy was assigned to the United States Army Sanitary Corps during World War II, and sent to France. For his military service, the French government awarded Macy the Order of Public Health and named him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

#16371

Robert L. Usinger

1912 - 1968 (56 years)

Robert Leslie Usinger was an American entomologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Davis. A fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he served as president of the Entomological Society of America in 1965–1966. Prior to his appointment as their president, he was their fellow, starting from 1951. He produced over 250 publications, including several popular books, and was known as an expert on the Hemiptera, the "true bugs".

#16372

Dwight Isely

1887 - 1974 (87 years)

Dwight Isely was an American entomologist who worked on pest management, especially in cotton, and served as a professor of entomology at the University of Arkansas. He is considered a pioneer of what was later termed as Integrated Pest Management.

#16373

Willi Hennig

1913 - 1976 (63 years)

Emil Hans Willi Hennig was a German biologist and zoologist who is considered the founder of phylogenetic systematics, otherwise known as cladistics. In 1945 as a prisoner of war, Hennig began work on his theory of cladistics, which he published in German in 1950, with a substantially revised English translation published in 1966. With his works on evolution and systematics he revolutionised the view of the natural order of beings. As a taxonomist, he specialised in dipterans .

#16374

Clarence Hamilton Kennedy

1879 - 1952 (73 years)

#16375

Tracy I. Storer

Tracy I. Storer

1889 - 1973 (84 years)

Tracy Irwin Storer was an American zoologist known for his contributions to the wildlife of California and the ecology of the Sierra Nevada. He was a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis for over 30 years. He served as president of several biological societies, including the Cooper Ornithological Club , Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, the Society of Mammalogists, and the Wildlife Society, and was a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences which in 1968 awarded him the Fellow's Medal, the academy's highest honor.

#16376

Charles Schweinfurth

1890 - 1970 (80 years)

Charles Schweinfurth was an American botanist and plant collector who distinguished himself by his studies on orchids. He predominantly collected species from Peru which he described in his four volume reference work Orchids of Peru . He was a researcher at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University, and director of the Ames Orchid Herbarium where, in 1958, he was succeeded by Leslie Andrew Garay.

#16377

Beatrice M. Sweeney

1914 - 1989 (75 years)

Eleanor Beatrice Marcy "Beazy" Sweeney was an American plant physiologist and a pioneering investigator into circadian rhythms. At the time of her death she was professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she had worked since 1961.

#16378

James B. Kring

1921 - 1990 (69 years)

James Burton Kring was an American entomologist who worked at the University of Massachusetts and at the University of Florida. He was a specialist on the biology and behavior of aphids. Kring was born in Monett, Missouri and went to study at Rockhurst College, obtaining a BS in 1947 followed by studies at Kansas State University receiving a MS in 1948 and a PhD in 1952. Between 1940 and 1943 he served in the US Navy aboard the USS Hatfield. He also worked in the Medical Service Corps. He joined Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station as an assistant entomology in 1951 and rose to the position of entomologist in 1962.

#16379

Ira J. Condit

1883 - 1981 (98 years)

Ira Judson Condit was an American horticulturist who studied subtropical fruits, including the fig, the olive, and the avocado. Early life and education Ira J. Condit was born November 18, 1883, in Jersey, Ohio, and graduated from Granville High School in 1900. He went on to Ohio State University, where he received his B.S. in 1905. After more than a decade working in various horticulture-related jobs, he returned to school, earning an M.S. from the University of California and a Ph.D. from Stanford University .

#16380

Elso Barghoorn

1915 - 1984 (69 years)

Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn was an American paleobotanist, called by his student Andrew Knoll, the present Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard, "the father of Pre-Cambrian palaeontology." Barghoorn is best known for discovering in South African rocks fossil evidence of life that is at least 3.4 billion years old. These fossils show that life was present on Earth comparatively soon after the Late Heavy Bombardment .

#16381

Hans Thacher Clarke

1887 - 1972 (85 years)

Hans Thacher Clarke was a prominent biochemist during the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in England where he received his university training, but also studied in Germany and Ireland. He spent the remainder of his life in the United States.

#16382

Philip Sheppard

1921 - 1976 (55 years)

Professor Philip MacDonald Sheppard, F.R.S. was a British geneticist and lepidopterist. He made advances in ecological and population genetics in lepidopterans, pulmonate land snails and humans. In medical genetics, he worked with Sir Cyril Clarke on Rh disease.

#16383

Sterling Howard Emerson

1900 - 1988 (88 years)

Sterling Howard Emerson was an American geneticist. Emerson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951. Life Sterling Howard Emerson was born on October 29, 1900 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of Rollins Adams Emerson and Harriet Hardin. Emerson was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in 1922, and admitted as a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1928. Emerson was the professor of genetics at the California Institute of Technology from 1928 to 1971. Emerson died on May 2, 1988, in Altadena, California.

#16384

Lemuel Roscoe Cleveland

1892 - 1969 (77 years)

Lemuel Roscoe Cleveland was an American zoologist and protistologist, famous for giving the first, strong empirical proof for the existence of a symbiotic relationship between internal microorganisms and their metazoan host.

#16385

Louise Pearce

1885 - 1959 (74 years)

Louise Pearce was an American pathologist at the Rockefeller Institute who helped develop a treatment for African sleeping sickness . Sleeping sickness was a fatal epidemic which had devastated areas of Africa, killing two-thirds of the population of the Uganda protectorate between 1900 and 1906 alone. With chemists Walter Abraham Jacobs and Michael Heidelberger and pathologist Wade Hampton Brown, Pearce worked to develop and test arsenic-based drugs for its treatment. In 1920, Louise Pearce traveled to the Belgian Congo where she designed and carried out a drug testing protocol for human trials to establish tryparsamide's safety, effectiveness, and optimum dosage.

#16386

Hans Hoff

1897 - 1969 (72 years)

Hans Hoff was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist. Life After completing his medical studies at the University of Vienna in 1918 Hoff worked as assistant physician and as an assistant at the clinic under Julius Wagner-Jauregg. In 1932 he became a private lecturer and specialist in psychiatry and neurology. In 1936 he was appointed to the board of the Department of Neurology clinic in Vienna.

#16387

Douglas Vernon Hubble

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

Sir Douglas Vernon Hubble was a paediatric endocrinologist, general practitioner, and professor of paediatrics and dean of medicine at the University of Birmingham. Hubble was principally notable for research into paediatric endocrinology and publishing a number of papers on the subject, which gave him a national reputation.

#16388

Bryan Patterson

1909 - 1979 (70 years)

Bryan Patterson was an American paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Life and career Bryan Patterson was the son of the soldier, engineer and author John Henry Patterson and Frances Helena Gray Patterson, who, in 1890, had been one of the first women to be granted a Doctor of Laws degree in the British Isles.

#16389

Kiyomatsu Matsubara

1907 - 1968 (61 years)

was a Japanese marine biologist, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. Born Kiyomatsu Sakamoto in Hyogo Prefecture, Kiyomatsu Matsubara was the first professor of the Department of Fisheries of the University of Kyoto and is considered to be the founder of Japanese research on fish systematics. He changed his name to "Matsubara" in the early 1930s. He has focused his research primarily on the scorpionfish and published many books and scholarly articles. He described several new species of fish, including the crocodile shark .

#16390

Clyde E. Keeler

1900 - 1994 (94 years)

Clyde Edgar Keeler was a medical geneticist who is noted for his work on laboratory mice and the genetics of vision. His work was instrumental in the understanding of retinitis pigmentosa. He also seems to have published the first scientific paper on non-rod non-cone visual sensation.

#16391

Theodor von Brand

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Theodor von Brand , full name Theodor Kurt Freiherr von Brand zu Neidstein, was a German American parasitologist. Theodor von Brand is a descendant of the German noble family von Brand. His mother Diana von Brandt was a née Freiin von Hirsch from a Jewish German noble family.

#16392

David Marr

1945 - 1980 (35 years)

David Courtenay Marr was a British neuroscientist and physiologist. Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. His work was very influential in computational neuroscience and led to a resurgence of interest in the discipline.

#16393

Hermann Braus

1868 - 1924 (56 years)

Hermann Braus was a German anatomist who worked as a professor of comparative zoology at the University of Heidelberg and of anatomy at the University of Würzburg. He was involved in studies on the evolution of the tetrapod limb and pioneered techniques for visualization in anatomical studies.

#16394

Boris Ephrussi

1901 - 1979 (78 years)

Boris Ephrussi , Professor of Genetics at the University of Paris, was a Russo-French geneticist. Boris was born on 9 May 1901 into a Jewish family. His father, Samuel Osipovich Ephrussi, was a chemical engineer; his grandfather, Joseph Ephrusi , was the founder of a banking dynasty in Kishinev. He published two papers in November 1966 which represented a key step in a decade of research in his laboratory. This research helped transform mammalian, and especially human, genetics.

#16395

Susumu Hagiwara

Susumu Hagiwara

1922 - 1989 (67 years)

Susumu Hagiwara was a Japanese-born American physician and neuroscientist. Hagiwara was born and raised in Hokkaido, Japan, attending the University of Tokyo for his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees. He became a professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University before migrating to the United States to serve as professor for both the University of California, San Diego and University of California, Los Angeles.

#16396

Haldan Keffer Hartline

Haldan Keffer Hartline

1903 - 1983 (80 years)

Haldan Keffer Hartline was an American physiologist who was a co-recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in analyzing the neurophysiological mechanisms of vision. Education Hartline did his undergraduate studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1923. He began his study of retinal electrophysiology as a National Research Council Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, receiving his medical degree in 1927.

#16397

Otto C. Glaser

1880 - 1951 (71 years)

Otto Charles Glaser was an American zoologist. Biography He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. His parents were of French and German descent, and he came with them to the United States while very young. He got his early education in private schools in Baltimore, and then spent two years in Baltimore City College . In 1900 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University. He stayed there to do graduate work, and in 1904 received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy His doctoral thesis was "The Larva of Fasciolaria tulipa ".

#16398

Elizabeth C. Crosby

Elizabeth C. Crosby

1888 - 1983 (95 years)

Elizabeth Caroline Crosby was an American neuroanatomist. Crosby received the National Medal of Science from President Jimmy Carter in 1979 "for outstanding contributions to comparative and human neuroanatomy and for the synthesis and transmission of knowledge of the entire nervous system of the vertebrate phylum." Her "careful descriptions" of vertebrate brains - especially reptiles - helped "outline evolutionary history" and her work as a clinical diagnostic assistant to neurosurgeons resulted in "the correlation of anatomy and surgery."

#16399

Leo Alexander

1905 - 1985 (80 years)

Leo Alexander was an American psychiatrist, neurologist, educator, and author, of Austrian-Jewish origin. He was a key medical advisor during the Nuremberg Trials. Alexander wrote part of the Nuremberg Code, which provides legal and ethical principles for scientific experiment on humans.

#16400

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

1879 - 1967 (88 years)

Ralph Vary Chamberlin was an American biologist, ethnographer, and historian from Salt Lake City, Utah. He was a faculty member of the University of Utah for over 25 years, where he helped establish the School of Medicine and served as its first dean, and later became head of the zoology department. He also taught at Brigham Young University and the University of Pennsylvania, and worked for over a decade at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he described species from around the world.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions