Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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

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

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1701

John Kappler

#39728

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

John Wayne Kappler is a professor in the Department of Integrated Immunology at National Jewish Health. His principal research is in T cell biology, a subject he collaborates on with his wife Philippa Marrack. In 1983 they discovered the T cell receptor, together with Ellis Reinherz and James Allison.

#1702

Johan Auwerx

#26890

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Johan Auwerx is a Belgian biologist, and a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . His research in the fields of cellular metabolism has contributed to a better understanding of the regulation of mitochondrial function by signaling pathways.

#1703

Tania A. Baker

#34695

Overall Influence

Tania A. Baker is an American biochemist who is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and formally the head of the Department of Biology. She earned her B.S. in Biochemistry from University of Wisconsin–Madison and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Stanford University under the guidance of Arthur Kornberg. She joined the MIT faculty in 1992 and her research is focused on the mechanisms and regulation of DNA transposition and protein chaperones. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a How...

#1704

Arthur Winfree

#22320

Overall Influence

1942 - 2002 (60 years)

Arthur Taylor Winfree was a theoretical biologist at the University of Arizona. He was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. Winfree was noted for his work on the mathematical modeling of biological phenomena : from cardiac arrhythmia and circadian rhythms to the self-organization of slime mold colonies and the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction. Winfree was a MacArthur Fellow from 1984 to 1989, he won the Einthoven Prize for his work on ventricular fibrillation, and shared the 2000 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics with Alexandre Chorin.

#1705

Mary Blue

#22891

Overall Influence

Mary Elizabeth Blue is an American neurobiologist and computational neurologist. She is an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a research scientist in the neuroscience laboratory at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

#1706

Gordon Conway

#13592

Overall Influence

1938 - 2023 (85 years)

Sir Gordon Richard Conway was a British agricultural ecologist, who served as the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Royal Geographical Society. He was latterly Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London and Director of Agriculture for Impact, a grant funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on European support of agricultural development in Africa.

#1707

Francesca Happé

Francesca Happé

#22626

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Francesca Gabrielle Elizabeth Happé is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. Her research concerns autism spectrum conditions, specifically the understanding social cognitive processes in these conditions.

#1708

Robert Schimke

#35298

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Robert Tod Schimke was an American biochemist and cancer researcher. He was born in Spokane, Washington, the son of a dentist and a homemaker. Schimke obtained an undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1954, and an MD degree in 1958.

#1709

Claire M. Fraser

Claire M. Fraser

#32573

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Claire M. Fraser is an American genome scientist and microbiologist who has worked in microbial genomics and genome medicine. Her research has contributed to the understanding of the diversity and evolution of microbial life. Fraser is the director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, where she holds the Dean's Endowed Professorship in the School of Medicine. She has joint faculty appointments at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology. In 2019, she began servin...

#1710

J. L. Hubby

#35189

Overall Influence

1932 - 1996 (64 years)

John Lee Hubby was an American geneticist, pioneer of gel electrophoresis, and co-author, with Richard Lewontin, of foundational studies in the field of molecular evolution. After earning a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1959, Hubby took a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, followed by a faculty position there. In the early 1960s, he developed new applications for gel electrophoresis. He applied the technique to identify different versions of the same protein, reflecting different alleles for the same genetic locus, in fruit flies. Hubby collaborated with L...

#1711

Clarke Fraser

#36674

Overall Influence

1920 - 2014 (94 years)

Frank Clarke Fraser was a Canadian medical geneticist. Spanning the fields of science and medicine, he was Canada's first medical geneticist, one of the creators of the discipline of medical genetics in North America, and laid the foundations in the field of Genetic Counselling, which has enhanced the lives of patients worldwide. Among his many accomplishments, Fraser pioneered work in the genetics of cleft palate and popularized the concept of multifactorial disease.

#1712

Margaret Hotchkiss

#43292

Overall Influence

Margaret Hotchkiss was a distinguished professor at the University of Kentucky. She is a microbiologist known for her work on bacteria in seawater and sewage, and fungi that cause disease. In 1957, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

#1713

John Mattick

#41845

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

John Stanley Mattick is an Australian molecular biologist known for his efforts to assign function to non-coding DNA. Mattick was the executive director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research from 2012 to 2018. He joined Genomics England in May 2018 as Chief Executive Officer. In October 2019, he joined the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

#1714

Jean Weissenbach

#22612

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Jean Weissenbach is a French biologist. He is the current director of the Genoscope. He is one of the pioneers of sequencing and genome analysis. Publications

#1715

Dennis McKenna

#9936

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dennis Jon McKenna is an American ethnopharmacologist, research pharmacognosist, lecturer and author. He is the brother of well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna and is a founding board member and the director of ethnopharmacology at the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit organization concerned with the investigation of the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic medicines.

#1716

Pedro Cuatrecasas

#54055

Overall Influence

#1717

Jan Klein

#43334

Overall Influence

1936 - 2023 (87 years)

Jan Klein was a Czech–American immunologist. Professional life Jan Klein was a Czech-American immunologist, best known for his work on the major histocompatibility complex . He was born in 1936 in Stemplovec, Opava, Czech Republic. He graduated from the Charles University at Prague, in 1955, and received his M.S. in botany from the same school in 1958. He was a teacher at the Neruda High School in Prague from 1958 to 1961. He received his Ph.D. in genetics from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1965, and moved to Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow the same year. He became assistant professor in 1969, and associate professor in 1973 at the University of Michigan.

#1718

Klaus Rohde

#47254

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Klaus Rohde is a German biologist and parasitologist at the University of New England , Australia. He is known particularly for his work on marine parasitology, evolutionary ecology, zoogeography, phylogeny, and ultrastructure of lower invertebrates.

#1719

Trefor Jenkins

#24981

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Trefor Jenkins is a human geneticist from South Africa, noted for his work on DNA. He is the former dean of the medical school at the University of Witwatersrand. Early life Jenkins qualified in medicine at King's College and Westminster Hospital in London. He came to Africa as a mine medical officer in Southern Rhodesia in 1960 where he first encountered sickle cell anaemia which started his interest in genetics.

#1720

Douglas E. Soltis

#49762

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Douglas Soltis is a Distinguished Professor in the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics, Florida Museum of Natural History and Department of Biology at the University of Florida. His research interests are in plant evolution and phylogeny, an area in which he has published extensively together with his wife Pamela Soltis and together they were the joint awardees of the 2006 Asa Gray Award. They are the principal investigators in the Soltis laboratory, where they both hold the rank of Distinguished Professor and are contributing authors of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group.

#1721

Ronald B. Herberman

#50844

Overall Influence

1940 - 2013 (73 years)

Ronald Bruce Herberman was an American physician, immunologist, oncologist, and professor of medicine and pathology who founded the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute , a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Care Center in 1984. He helped discover natural killer cells capable of killing cancer. He became well known outside the medical community in 2008 for his public warning about the potential health impacts of mobile telephones and recommending a reduction in their use.

#1722

Staffan Normark

Staffan Normark

#22827

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jan Staffan Normark is a Swedish physician, microbiologist and infectious disease researcher. He grew up in Umeå and was awarded his Ph.D. at Umeå University in 1971. At the end of the 1970s, he was one of the first Swedish scientists to use the new genetic engineering tools in infection-related research. In 1980, he was made a professor at Umeå University, then the university's youngest. 1989 he was recruited as professor of molecular microbiology to Washington University in St. Louis. 1993 he returned to Sweden as professor of infectious disease control, in particular clinical bacteriology, at Karolinska Institutet.

#1723

Pei Gang

#20997

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Pei Gang is a Chinese molecular biologist and pharmacologist, and a former president of Tongji University. Early life Pei was born in Shenyang, Liaoning in 1953. Education In 1977, Pei attended Shenyang Pharmaceutical University. He acquired his bachelor's degree and master's degree in 1982 and 1984, respectively. Pei enrolled at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for doctoral studies, and received his PhD degree in 1991.

#1724

Marco Marra

#24615

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Marco A. Marra is a Distinguished Scientist and Director of Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre and Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia . He also serves as UBC Canada Research Chair in Genome Science for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and is an inductee in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. Marra has been instrumental in bringing genome science to Canada by demonstrating the pivotal role that genomics can play in human health and disease research.

#1725

Martin. Alexander

#54312

Overall Influence

#1726

Brian J. Ford

#11990

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Brian J. Ford HonFLS HonFRMS is an independent research biologist, author, and lecturer, who publishes on scientific issues for the general public. He has also been a television personality for more than 40 years. Ford is an international authority on the microscope. Throughout his career, Ford has been associated with many academic bodies. He was elected a Fellow of Cardiff University in 1986, was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Leicester, and has been awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Microscopical Society and of the Linnean Society of London. In America, he was awa...

#1727

Patrick S. Moore

Patrick S. Moore

#28461

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Patrick S. Moore is an Irish and American virologist and epidemiologist who co-discovered together with his wife, Yuan Chang, two different human viruses causing the AIDS-related cancer Kaposi's sarcoma and the skin cancer Merkel cell carcinoma. The couple met while in medical school together and were married in 1989 while they pursued fellowships at different universities.

#1728

Sanford Palay

#41202

Overall Influence

1918 - 2002 (84 years)

Sanford Louis "Sandy" Palay was an American scientist and educator. Academic Background Palay received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College. Upon graduation in 1940, he entered the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University to study bacteriology. He changed his mind, and decided to study medicine, later specializing in neuroscience. He applied for a summer fellowship during his first year of medical school and was accepted into the laboratory of Ernst and Berta Scharrer, where Palay carried out his first investigations. Palay's professional and personal association with the S...

#1729

David Attwell

#42953

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Attwell FRS is a British neuroscientist, and the Jodrell Professor of Physiology at University College London in the Faculty of Life Sciences. Life David Ian Attwell studied physics and physiology at Magdalen College, Oxford, and earned D.Phil. in neuroscience from Oxford, where he studied with Julian Jack. He also studied at the University of California, Berkeley with Frank Werblin.

#1730

Eric Knudsen

#44817

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Eric Knudsen is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University. He is best known for his discovery, along with Masakazu Konishi, of a brain map of sound location in two dimensions in the barn owl, tyto alba. His work has contributed to the understanding of information processing in the auditory system of the barn owl, the plasticity of the auditory space map in developing and adult barn owls, the influence of auditory and visual experience on the space map, and more recently, mechanisms of attention and learning. He is a recipient of the Lashley Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, ...

#1731

Frank M. Carpenter

#42979

Overall Influence

1902 - 1994 (92 years)

Frank Morton Carpenter was an American entomologist and paleontologist. He received his PhD from Harvard University, and was curator of fossil insects at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology for 60 years. He studied the Permian fossil insects of Elmo, Kansas, and compared the North American fossil insect fauna with Paleozoic taxa known from elsewhere in the world. A careful and methodical worker, he used venation and mouthparts to determine the relationships of fossil taxa, and was author of the Treatise volume on Insects. He reduced the number of extinct insect orders then described ...

#1732

Steven Clarke

#39110

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Steven G. Clarke, an American biochemist, is a director of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA biochemistry department. Clarke heads a laboratory at UCLA's department of chemistry and biochemistry. Clarke is famous for his work on molecular damage and discoveries of novel molecular repair mechanisms.

#1733

Gary Borisy

#47367

Overall Influence

Gary G. Borisy is a retired president and director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 2013, Borisy joined the Department of Microbiology at the Forsyth Institute. Borisy received his BS in biochemistry and Ph.D. in biophysics under Edwin Taylor from the University of Chicago, characterizing tubulin and its role in cell division. He then did a postdoc at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England under Hugh Huxley.

#1734

Joseph T. Coyle

#54459

Overall Influence

#1735

Vincent Dethier

Vincent Dethier

#42875

Overall Influence

1915 - 1993 (78 years)

Vincent Gaston Dethier was an American physiologist and entomologist. Considered a leading expert in his field, he was a pioneer in the study of insect-plant interactions and wrote more than 170 academic papers and 15 science books. From 1975 until his death, he was the Gilbert L. Woodside Professor of Zoology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was the founding director of its Neuroscience and Behavior Program and chaired the Chancellor's Commission on Civility. Dethier also wrote natural history books for non-specialists, as well as short stories, essays, and children's boo...

#1736

Bradley Hyman

#50588

Overall Influence

Bradley Theodore Hyman is currently John B. Penney, Jr. Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Massachusetts Alzheimer Disease Research Center and Memory Disorder Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was educated at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa . He was awarded the Metlife Foundation Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease in 2001 and the Potamkin Prize in 2006, together with Karen Duff and Karen Ashe.

#1737

Paul D. N. Hebert

Paul D. N. Hebert

#49835

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Paul David Neil Hebert is a Canadian biologist. He is founder and director of the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He applied the technique invented by Carl Woese and colleagues in the 1980s to arthropods and called it DNA barcoding.

#1738

Elisa Izaurralde

#35212

Overall Influence

1959 - 2018 (59 years)

Elisa Izaurralde was an Uruguayan biochemist and molecular biologist. She served as Director and Scientific Member of the Department of Biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen from 2005 until her death in 2018. In 2008, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, shared with Elena Conti, for "fundamental new insights into intracellular RNA transport and RNA metabolism". Together with Conti, she helped characterize proteins important for exporting mRNA out of the nucleus and later in her career she helped elucidate mechanisms of mRNA silencing, t...

#1739

Viktor Emil Frankl

#54474

Overall Influence

#1740

David D. Sabatini

#29392

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

David Domingo Sabatini is an Argentine-American cell biologist and the Frederick L. Ehrman Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology in the Department of Cell Biology at New York University School of Medicine, which he chaired from 1972 to 2011. Sabatini's major research interests have been on the mechanisms responsible for the structural complexity of the eukaryotic cell. Throughout his career, Sabatini has been recognized for his efforts in promoting science in Latin America.

#1741

Peter B. Reich

#54547

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

#1742

Christopher Burge

#48222

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Christopher Boyce Burge is Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education Burge completed his Bachelor of Science at Stanford University in 1990, and continued graduate studies in computational biology at Stanford University, gaining his PhD in 1997 under the supervision of Samuel Karlin. During his time at Stanford he was responsible for developing algorithms for GENSCAN used in gene prediction for example the initial analysis of the Human Genome Project. His PhD thesis was titled Identification of genes in human genomic DNA.

#1743

Barry Everitt

#30192

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Barry John Everitt, is a British neuroscientist and academic. He was Master of Downing College, Cambridge , and Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge . He is now emeritus professor and Director of Research. From 2013 to 2022, he was provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust at Cambridge University.

#1744

Robert D. Goldman

#36626

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Robert D. Goldman is an American cell and molecular biologist. He was the Chair of the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He held the Stephen Walter Ranson Professor of Cell Biology at the institution. He is currently a Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at Feinberg.

#1745

Trevor Walworth Goodwin

#54633

Overall Influence

#1746

Utpal Banerjee

#33348

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Utpal Banerjee is a distinguished professor of the department of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, India and obtained his Master of Science degree in physical chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. In 1984, he obtained a PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology where he was also a postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Seymour Benzer from 1984-1988.

#1747

Martin Heisenberg

#22172

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Martin Heisenberg is a German neurobiologist and geneticist. Before his retirement in 2008, he held the professorial chair for genetics and neurobiology at the Bio Centre of the University of Würzburg. Since then, he continues his research with a senior professorship at the Rudolf Virchow Center of the University of Würzburg. Heisenberg studied chemistry and molecular biology in Munich, Tübingen and Pasadena. In 1975 he became Professor of genetics and neurobiology at the University of Würzburg. Heisenberg's work has focused on the neurogenetics of Drosophila , with the aim of investigating t...

#1748

Todd Golub

#27060

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Todd R. Golub is a professor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School, the Charles A. Dana Investigator in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, and the Director and a founding member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is a world leader in applying genomic tools to cancer research, having made important discoveries in the molecular basis of childhood leukemia.

#1749

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle

#30972

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle was an American neurophysiologist and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in the 1950s. This discovery was a turning point in investigations of the cerebral cortex, as nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper, on the somatosensory cortex, used columnar organization as their basis.

#1750

Robert Fettiplace

Robert Fettiplace

#45262

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Robert Fettiplace FRS is a British neuroscientist, and Steenbock Professor of Neural and Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Work Fettiplace studied the mechanism of hearing in vertebrates. In 1976, he and Andrew Crawford developed a method of recording the electrical responses of hair cells in the isolated cochlea of reptiles. These experiments, which were the first to give extensive quantitative records from auditory receptorss, showed that each hair cell is sharply tuned to a characteristic frequency and that much of the frequency selectivity in the turtle’s ear can be attributed to electrical resonance in the hair cell membrane.

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