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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.

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#17001

John Farquhar Fulton

John Farquhar Fulton

1899 - 1960 (61 years)

John Farquhar Fulton was an American neurophysiologist and historian of science. He received numerous degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University. He taught at Magdalen College School of Medicine at Oxford and later became the youngest Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale University. His main contributions were in primate neurophysiology and history of science.

#17002

Donald O. Hebb

1904 - 1985 (81 years)

Donald Olding Hebb was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning, which he introduced in his classic 1949 work The Organization of Behavior. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His views on learning described behavior and thought ...

#17003

J. F. Gates Clarke

1905 - 1990 (85 years)

John Frederick Gates Clarke was a Canadian-American entomologist and an authority on moths. He worked at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. External links

#17004

Yellapragada Subbarow

Yellapragada Subbarow

1895 - 1948 (53 years)

Yellapragada Subbarow was an Indian American biochemist who discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate as an energy source in the cell, developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer and led the department at Lederle laboratories in which Benjamin Minge Duggar discovered chlortetracycline in 1945.

#17005

James Gray

1891 - 1975 (84 years)

Sir James Gray, was a British zoologist who helped establish the field of cytology. Gray was also known for his work in animal locomotion and the development of experimental zoology. He is known for Gray's Paradox concerning dolphin locomotion.

#17006

John Baker

1900 - 1984 (84 years)

John Randal Baker FRS was an English biologist, zoologist, and microscopist, and a professor at the University of Oxford, where he was Emeritus Reader in Cytology. He received his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in 1927.

#17007

E. Newton Harvey

E. Newton Harvey

1887 - 1959 (72 years)

Edmund Newton Harvey was an American zoologist. He was acknowledged as one of the leading authorities on bioluminescence. He won the Rumford Prize in 1947 and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1929.

#17008

Masayori Inouye

1900 - Present (126 years)

Masayori Inouye is a distinguished professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University. He, along with his team, discovered natural antisense RNA. Inouye was also a key scientist involved in the discovery and characterization of retrons, which are retroviral-like elements found in various bacterial genomes.

#17009

Alfred Sturtevant

1891 - 1970 (79 years)

Alfred Henry Sturtevant was an American geneticist. Sturtevant constructed the first genetic map of a chromosome in 1911. Throughout his career he worked on the organism Drosophila melanogaster with Thomas Hunt Morgan. By watching the development of flies in which the earliest cell division produced two different genomes, he measured the embryonic distance between organs in a unit which is called the sturt in his honor. On February 13, 1968, Sturtevant received the 1967 National Medal of Science from President Lyndon B. Johnson.

#17010

Alfred Romer

1894 - 1973 (79 years)

Alfred Sherwood Romer was an American paleontologist and biologist and a specialist in vertebrate evolution. Biography Alfred Romer was born in White Plains, New York, the son of Harry Houston Romer and his wife, Evalyn Sherwood. He was educated at White Plains High School.

#17011

David Bruce Dill

1891 - 1986 (95 years)

David Bruce Dill was an American physiologist specializing in exercise science and environmental physiology. He served as president of the American Physiological Society and was a founding director of Harvard's Fatigue Laboratory, where he remained as Director of Research until it closed in 1947.

#17012

Karl Friedrich Meyer

Karl Friedrich Meyer

1884 - 1974 (90 years)

Karl Friedrich Meyer was an American scientist of Swiss origin. He was one of the most prodigious scientists in many areas of infectious diseases in man and animals, the ecology of pathogens, epidemiology and public health.[1-6] Some called him the “Pasteur of the 20th century”.

#17013

Mary Beckerle

Mary C. Beckerle is an American cell biologist who studies cancer at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah School of Medicine. At Huntsman Cancer Institute, she serves as the CEO and also as Associate Vice President for Cancer Affairs at the University of Utah. Beckerle's research helped to define a novel molecular pathway for cell motility, and more recently, she has begun research into Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric bone cancer. Beckerle's lab made a ground breaking discovery in regards to Ewing's Sarcoma in relation to the EWS/FLI protein. Her lab discovered EWS/FLI to disru...

#17014

Raymond Cecil Moore

1892 - 1974 (82 years)

Raymond Cecil Moore was an Americann geologist and paleontologist. He is known for his work on Paleozoic crinoids, bryozoans, and corals. Moore was a member of US Geological Survey from 1913 until 1949. In 1919 he became professor at the University of Kansas . In 1953 Professor Moore organized the launch and became the first editor of the still ongoing multi-volume work Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Contributors to the Treatise have included the world's specialists in the field. He served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1958. In 1970 he was awarded the Mary Clar...

#17015

James Collip

1892 - 1965 (73 years)

James Bertram Collip was a Canadian biochemist who was part of the Toronto group which isolated insulin. He served as the chair of the department of biochemistry at McGill University from 1928 to 1941 and dean of medicine at the University of Western Ontario from 1947 to 1961, where he was a charter member of The Kappa Alpha Society.

#17016

Charles Sutherland Elton

1900 - 1991 (91 years)

Charles Sutherland Elton was an English zoologist and animal ecologist. He is associated with the development of population and community ecology, including studies of invasive organisms. Personal life Charles Sutherland Elton was born in Manchester, a son of the literary scholar Oliver Elton and the children's writer Letitia Maynard Elton . He had an older brother, Geoffrey Elton, who died at 33, and to whom Charles Elton in many of his writings attributes his interest in scientific natural history. Charles Elton married the English poet Edith Joy Scovell in 1937, a first five-year marriage to Rose Montague having ended in amicable divorce.

#17017

Frits Warmolt Went

Frits Warmolt Went

1903 - 1990 (87 years)

Frits Warmolt Went was a Dutch biologist whose 1928 experiment demonstrated the existence of auxin in plants. Went's father was the prominent Dutch botanist Friedrich August Ferdinand Christian Went. After graduating from the University of Utrecht, Holland in 1927 with a dissertation on the effects of the plant hormone auxin, Went then worked as a plant pathologist in the research labs of the Royal Botanical Garden in Buitenzorg, Dutch East Indies from 1927 to 1933. He then took a position at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, first researching plant hormones. His interest gradually shifted to environmental influences on plant growth.

#17018

Harry Godwin

1901 - 1985 (84 years)

Sir Harry Godwin, FRS was a prominent English botanist and ecologist of the 20th century. He is considered to be an influential peatland scientist, who coined the phrase "peat archives" in 1981. He had a long association with Clare College, Cambridge.

#17019

Ernst Chain

1906 - 1979 (73 years)

Sir Ernst Boris Chain was a German-born British biochemist best known for being a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on penicillin. Life and career Chain was born in Berlin, the son of Margarete and Michael Chain, a chemist and industrialist dealing in chemical products. His family was of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His father emigrated from Russia to study chemistry abroad and his mother was from Berlin. In 1930, he received his degree in chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University. His father descends from Zerahiah ben Shealtiel Ḥen w...

#17020

Leo Loeb

1869 - 1959 (90 years)

Leo Loeb , was a German-American physician, educator, and experimental pathologist. Early life Loeb, son of a Jewish family from the German Eifel region, was born in 1869 in Mayen, Kingdom of Prussia. He was orphaned as a child and grew up in the care of an uncle. Because of ill health, Leo was educated in schools that were located in German "spa" towns. As a teenager, he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, but his tenure there was short. Indeed, over the succeeding couple of years, he spent only brief periods at several universities, in Berlin, Freiburg, and Basel, unable to focus his interests.

#17021

André Frédéric Cournand

André Frédéric Cournand

1895 - 1988 (93 years)

André Frédéric Cournand was a French-American physician and physiologist. Biography Cournand was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956 along with Werner Forssmann and Dickinson W. Richards for the development of cardiac catheterization.

#17022

George W. Corner

George W. Corner

1889 - 1981 (92 years)

George Washington Corner FRS FRSE was an American physician, embryologist and pioneer of the contraceptive pill. He received an outstanding ten honorary degrees from various universities. He played a critical role in the discovery of progesterone. He was described as both a medical historian and a humanist.

#17023

Harry Stack Sullivan

1892 - 1949 (57 years)

Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that "personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal relationships in which [a] person lives" and that "[t]he field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which [such] relations exist". Having studied therapists Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William Alanson White, he devoted years of clinical and research work to helping people with psychotic illness.

#17024

Charles Roy Henderson

1911 - 1989 (78 years)

Charles Roy Henderson was an American statistician and a pioneer in animal breeding — the application of quantitative methods for the genetic evaluation of domestic livestock. This is critically important because it allows farmers and geneticists to predict whether a crop or animal will have a desired trait, and to what extent the trait will be expressed. He developed mixed model equations to obtain best linear unbiased predictions of breeding values and, in general, any random effect. He invented three methods for the estimation of variance components in unbalanced settings of mixed models, ...

#17025

Simeon Burt Wolbach

1880 - 1954 (74 years)

Simeon Burt Wolbach was an American pathologist, researcher, teacher, and journal editor who elucidated the infection vectors for Rocky Mountain spotted fever and epidemic typhus. He was president of the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists and of the American Society for Experimental Pathology.

#17026

Irene Manton

1904 - 1988 (84 years)

Irene Manton, FRS FLS was a British botanist who was Professor of Botany at the University of Leeds. She was noted for study of ferns and algae. Biography Irene Manton was the daughter of dental surgeon, George Manton and embroideress and designer, and descendant of French aristocracy, Milana Manton . Her first name was originally pronounced and spelled in the French manner; but at 18 she dropped this and opted for "Irene". Her sister was the entomologist Sidnie Manton FRS. She was educated at the Froebel Demonstration School and St. Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith. While still in school s...

#17027

Clive McCay

1898 - 1967 (69 years)

Clive Maine McCay was an American biochemist, nutritionist and gerontologist. Biography McCay was professor of animal husbandry at Cornell University from 1927 to 1963. His main interest was the influence of nutrition on aging. He is best known for his work in proving that caloric restriction increases the life span of rats, which is seen as seminal in triggering further research and experiments in the field of nutrition and longevity. Scientists are still trying to understand the connection between caloric restriction and longevity.

#17028

C. C. Little

1888 - 1971 (83 years)

Clarence Cook Little was an American genetics, cancer, and tobacco researcher and academic administrator, as well as a proponent of eugenics. Early life C. C. Little was born in Brookline, Massachusetts and attended Harvard University after his secondary education at the Noble and Greenough School. Little received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1910, an M.S. in 1912, and D.Sc. in 1914 in zoology, with special focus in the new science of genetics. During World War I, Little served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, attaining the rank of Major. Following the war he spent three years at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

#17029

Charles Glen King

Charles Glen King

1896 - 1988 (92 years)

Charles Glen King was an American biochemist who was a pioneer in the field of nutrition research and who isolated vitamin C at the same time as Albert Szent-Györgyi. A biography of King states that many feel he deserves equal credit with Szent-Györgyi for the discovery of this vitamin.

#17030

Hideyo Noguchi

1876 - 1928 (52 years)

Hideyo Noguchi, also known as Seisaku Noguchi, was a prominent Japanese bacteriologist who in 1911 discovered the agent of syphilis as the cause of progressive paralytic disease. Early life Noguchi Hideyo, whose childhood name was Seisaku Noguchi, was born to a family of farmers for generations in Inawashiro, Fukushima prefecture in 1876. When he was one and a half years old, he fell into a fireplace and suffered a burn injury on his left hand. There was no doctor in the small village, but one of the men examined the boy. "The fingers of the left hand are mostly gone," he said, "and the left a...

#17031

Hugo Theorell

1903 - 1982 (79 years)

Axel Hugo Theodor Theorell was a Swedish scientist and Nobel Prize laureate in medicine. He was born in Linköping as the son of Thure Theorell and his wife Armida Bill. Theorell went to Secondary School at Katedralskolan in Linköping and passed his examination there on 23 May 1921. In September, he began to study medicine at the Karolinska Institute and in 1924 he graduated as a Bachelor of Medicine. He then spent three months studying bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris under Professor Albert Calmette. In 1930 he obtained his M.D. degree with a theory on the lipids of the blood p...

#17032

Richard D. Bardgett

1900 - Present (126 years)

#17033

Marie Lebour

1876 - 1971 (95 years)

Marie Victoire Lebour was a British marine biologist known for her study of the life cycles of various marine animals. She published more than 175 works during her long career. Early life and education Marie Lebour was born the youngest of three daughters to Emily and George Lebour in Woodburn, Northumberland on 20 August 1876. Her father was a professor of geology and Marie regularly joined him on expeditions, collecting specimens for her own collections. She attended Armstrong College and studied art, then went on to Durham University, where she earned degrees in zoology: an associate degre...

#17034

Philip Handler

1917 - 1981 (64 years)

Philip Handler was an American nutritionist, and biochemist. He was President of the United States National Academy of Sciences for two terms from 1969 to 1981. He was also a recipient of the National Medal of Science.

#17035

Erich Lindemann

1900 - 1974 (74 years)

Erich Lindemann was a German-American writer and psychiatrist, specializing in bereavement. He worked at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as the Chief of Psychiatry and is noted for his extensive study on the effects of traumatic events on survivors and families after the Cocoanut Grove night club fire in 1942. His contributions to the field of mental health led to the naming of a joint Harvard University–Commonwealth of Massachusetts-run mental health complex in Boston in his honor, the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center. He died on November 16, 1974.

#17036

August Thienemann

August Thienemann

1882 - 1960 (78 years)

August Friedrich Thienemann was a German limnologist, zoologist and ecologist. He studied zoology at the University of Greifswald. He was an associate Professor of Hydrobiology at the University of Kiel, and director of the former Hydrobiologische Anstalt der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft at Plön.

#17037

Rebecca Lancefield

Rebecca Lancefield

1895 - 1981 (86 years)

Rebecca Craighill Lancefield was a prominent American microbiologist. She joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York in 1918, and was associated with that institute throughout her long and outstanding career. Her bibliography comprises more than 50 publications published over 60 years.

#17038

John Whittemore Gowen

1893 - 1967 (74 years)

John Whittemore Gowen was an American biologist and geneticist. Biography Gowen was born in Evinston, Florida, on September 5, 1893, to Charles Hayes and Gertrude Whittemore Gowen. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Maine in 1914 and 1915, respectively. His advisor for his master's degree was Raymond Pearl. In 1917, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisors were Edmund Beecher Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan. Gowen then worked as a biologist at the Maine Agricultural Experimental Station until 1926, when he joined the Rockefeller Institute for ...

#17039

Philip Rodney White

1901 - 1968 (67 years)

Philip Rodney White was an American botanist and agricultural scientist. Born on July 25, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois, as one of twins, he studied in France and Germany before receiving his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. During 1930 and 1931, he worked in Berlin at the laboratory of Gottlieb Haberlandt. Most of White's research was on using plant tissues to grow viruses. He died in Bombay, India, while on a lecture tour, on March 25, 1968.

#17040

Zénon Bacq

1903 - 1983 (80 years)

Zénon Bacq was a Belgian radiobiologist and inventor. He studied medicine at the Université Libre de Bruxelles , and became an MD in 1927. He studied at Harvard University , with a grant from the FNRS. He taught animal physiology, pathology, as well as pharmacology and radiobiology at the University of Liège .

#17041

Herschel L. Roman

1914 - 1989 (75 years)

Herschel Lewis Roman was a geneticist famous for popularizing the use of yeast in genetic research. Biography Roman was born in Szumsk in eastern Poland on September 29, 1914. His father had moved to the United States, intending to bring Herschel and his mother, but they were not able to travel until 1921 because of World War I. After that, he spent his early years in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, then in St. Louis, where they had sent Herschel in advance to provide him with an urban high school education. He enrolled at the University of Missouri in 1932 and, majoring in chemistry and minoring in physics, graduated in 1936.

#17042

Edward W. Berry

1875 - 1945 (70 years)

Edward Wilber Berry was an American paleontologist and botanist; the principal focus of his research was paleobotany. Early life Berry was born February 10, 1875, in Newark, New Jersey, and finished high school in 1890 at the age of 15.

#17043

Albert Claude

1898 - 1983 (85 years)

Albert Claude was a Belgian-American cell biologist and medical doctor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade. His elementary education started in a comprehensive primary school at Longlier, his birthplace. He served in the British Intelligence Service during the First World War, and got imprisoned in concentration camps twice. In recognition of his service, he was granted enrolment at the University of Liège in Belgium to study medicine without any formal education required for the course. He earned his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1928.

#17044

Rudolph Schoenheimer

Rudolph Schoenheimer

1898 - 1941 (43 years)

Rudolf Schoenheimer was a German-American biochemist who developed the technique of isotope labelling/tagging of biomolecules, enabling detailed study of metabolism. This work revealed that all the constituents of an organism are in a constant state of chemical renewal.

#17045

H. E. Hinton

1912 - 1977 (65 years)

Howard Everest Hinton was a British entomologist and Professor who studied beetles. Education and early life Howard Hinton grew up in Mexico and attended Modesto Junior College and the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1939 for research on Mexican water beetles . During World War II he worked on the problem of storage of food products to counter the depredation of moths and beetles.

#17046

Horace Waring

1910 - 1980 (70 years)

Horace Waring was an English/Australian zoologist, winner of the Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1962. Waring was born in Toxteth Park, Liverpool, England, and was educated at the University of Liverpool . He was appointed the head of the department of zoology at the University of Birmingham in 1946. On 1 May 1948, Waring was appointed professor of zoology at the University of Western Australia.

#17047

William King Gregory

William King Gregory

1876 - 1970 (94 years)

William King Gregory was an American zoologist, renowned as a primatologist, paleontologist, and functional and comparative anatomist. He was an expert on mammalian dentition, and a leading contributor to theories of evolution. In addition he was active in presenting his ideas to students and the general public through books and museum exhibits.

#17048

Karl Paul Link

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

Karl Paul Gerhard Link was an American biochemist best known for his discovery of the anticoagulant warfarin. Training and early career He was born in LaPorte, Indiana to a Lutheran minister of German descent as one of ten children. He was schooled locally, and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied agricultural chemistry at the College of Agriculture from 1918 to 1925, obtaining an MS in 1923 and a PhD in 1925.

#17049

Kenneth N. Ogle

1902 - 1968 (66 years)

Kenneth N. Ogle was a scientist of human vision. He was born in Colorado, and attended the public school and college at Colorado Springs. In 1925, Ogle earned a bachelor's degree from Colorado College cum laude. After graduation from college and selection of physics as a career, Ogle spent two years at Dartmouth College, a year at the University of Minnesota, and then returned to Dartmouth College for his Ph.D. degree, awarded in 1930. He was later awarded an honorary medical degree by the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

#17050

Edwin Joseph Cohn

1892 - 1953 (61 years)

Edwin Joseph Cohn was a protein scientist. A graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover [1911], and the University of Chicago [1914, PhD 1917], he made important advances in the physical chemistry of proteins, and was responsible for the blood fractionation project that saved thousands of lives in World War II.

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