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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,

#17101

I. Michael Lerner

1910 - 1977 (67 years)

Israel Michael Lerner was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist. Born in Harbin, Manchuria, he received his Ph.D. in genetics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1936. He was appointed instructor of poultry husbandry and joined the university's department of genetics in 1958.

#17102

Edwin Broun Fred

1887 - 1981 (94 years)

Edwin Broun Fred was an American bacteriologist and academic who was the 15th president of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, serving from 1945 to 1958. Born in Virginia, Fred studied at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Göttingen. After briefly teaching at Virginia Polytechnic, Fred took a position with Wisconsin. He was dean of the graduate school from 1934 until 1943, then was dean of the College of Agriculture until 1945. He ascended to the presidency and was known for his response to the postwar growth in admissions. Fred was the president of the Society of Ameri...

#17103

Shlomo Hestrin

1914 - 1962 (48 years)

Shlomo Hestrin was an Israeli biochemist. Biography Hestrin was born in 1914 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He emigrated with his parents to then British Mandate of Palestine, now Israel, in 1932. Awards In 1957, Hestrin was awarded the Israel Prize, in exact sciences, jointly with his research partner David Sidney Feingold and their student Gad Avigad.

#17104

Arthur Thomas Doodson

1890 - 1968 (78 years)

Arthur Thomas Doodson was a British oceanographer. Early life and education Arthur Thomas Doodson was born in 1890 at Boothstown, Salford, the son of cotton-mill manager Thomas Doodson and Eleanor Pendlebury of Radcliffe, Lancashire. He was educated at Rochdale secondary school and in 1908 entered the University of Liverpool, graduating in both chemistry and mathematics . He was profoundly deaf and found it difficult to get a job but started with Ferranti in Manchester as a meter tester.

#17105

Arda Green

1899 - 1958 (59 years)

Arda Alden Green was an American biochemist who co-discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin and discovered the reaction responsible for firefly bioluminescence. She is also known for contributing to Gerty Cori and Carl Cori's elucidation of the Cori cycle and showing how pH affects hemoglobin's ability to bind and transport oxygen. She received the Garvan-Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society for her work.

#17106

Ralph Greenson

1911 - 1979 (68 years)

Ralph R. Greenson was a prominent American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Greenson is famous for being Marilyn Monroe's psychiatrist, and was the basis for Leo Rosten's 1963 novel, Captain Newman, M.D. The book was later made into a movie starring Gregory Peck as Greenson's character.

#17107

Dorothea Rudnick

1907 - 1990 (83 years)

Dorothea Rudnick was an American embryologist, who also made contributions as a scientific editor and translator. Early life and education Dorothea Rudnick was born in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin in 1907, and was raised in Chicago, Illinois. Her father Paul Rudnick was chief chemist for Armour Laboratories, and both of her brothers became physicists. As a student at Parker High School she won the $2500 grand prize in an essay contest sponsored by the Chicago Daily Tribune.

#17108

Pierre-Paul Grassé

1895 - 1985 (90 years)

Pierre-Paul Grassé was a French zoologist, writer of over 300 publications including the influential 52-volume Traité de Zoologie. He was an expert on termites and one of the last proponents of neo-Lamarckian evolution.

#17109

Percy Raymond

1879 - 1952 (73 years)

Percy Edward Raymond was a Harvard professor and paleontologist who specialized in the evolution of trilobites and studied fossils from the Burgess shales within which a region is named as the Raymond Quarry. He was among the careful explorers of the apparent explosion of life forms in the Cambrian period.

#17110

Sydney Harland

1891 - 1982 (91 years)

Sydney Cross Harland was a British agricultural botanist with considerable international experience. His area of expertise was especially in the growing of cotton. Early life and education Sydney Cross Harland was born in Snainton in Yorkshire on 19 June 1891, the son of Erasmus Harland and his wife Eliza. He was educated at the municipal secondary school in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.

#17111

Ernest Everett Just

Ernest Everett Just

1883 - 1941 (58 years)

Ernest Everett Just was a pioneering biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. In his work within marine biology, cytology and parthenogenesis, he advocated the study of whole cells under normal conditions, rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting.

#17112

Murray Fife Buell

1905 - 1975 (70 years)

Murray Fife Buell was an American ecologist and palynologist. Personal life Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Buell earned a B.S. at Cornell University in 1930. He then attended the University of Minnesota, where he earned a M.A. in 1934 and a Ph.D. in 1935. After completing his Ph.D., Buell's studies with W.S. Cooper stimulated his interest in plant ecology.

#17113

Walter Lee Gaines

1881 - 1950 (69 years)

Walter Lee Gaines was a pioneer of dairy science and a professor of milk production at the University of Illinois. He studied factors affecting hormonal injections and their induction of milk production. In 1915 he used a pituitary gland extract from goats to demonstrate the effect, and it was later identified that the hormone was oxytocin. He noted that anaesthetic prevented this hormone from being effective and Gaines was among the first to suggest the idea of a neuroendocrine reflex involving the production of the substance in response to suckling. He was also thus a pioneer of neuroendocr...

#17114

Horace Barber

1914 - 1971 (57 years)

Horace Newton Barber FAA FRS was an Australian botanist and geneticist, Foundation Professor of Botany at the University of Tasmania and Foundation Professor of Botany at the University of New South Wales .

#17115

Pearl Kendrick

1890 - 1980 (90 years)

Pearl Louella Kendrick was an American bacteriologist known for co-developing the first successful whooping cough vaccine alongside fellow Michigan Department of Public Health scientist Grace Eldering and chemist Loney Gordon in the 1930s. In the decades after the initial pertussis vaccine rollout, Kendrick contributed to the promotion of international vaccine standards in Latin America and the Soviet Union. Kendrick and her colleagues also developed a 3-in-1 shot for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus called the DTP vaccine which was initially released in 1948.

#17116

Malcolm J. Bennett

Malcolm Bennett, a Fellow of the Royal Society, is Professor of Plant Science at the University of Nottingham. Education and career He obtained his BSc in biochemistry with Molecular Biology from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1985 His PhD was from the University of Warwick in 1989. Bennett has held a number of prestigious fellowships including a BBSRC Professorial Research Fellowship, a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Fellowship and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellowship. In 2020 he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society.

#17117

Herbert Graham Cannon

1897 - 1963 (66 years)

Herbert Graham Cannon FRS FRSE FLS FRMS was a leading English zoologist and keen supporter of Lamarckism. Life He was born in Wimbledon, London on 14 April 1897 to David William Cannon, a compositor with Eyre & Spottiswoode, the third of four children. The family moved to Brixton when he was young. He won a scholarship and attended Wilson’s Grammar School in Camberwell. He won a place at Cambridge University studying Zoology, graduating in 1918.

#17118

Ruben A. Stirton

1901 - 1966 (65 years)

Ruben Arthur Stirton , known to his friends as "Stirt", was an American paleontologist, specializing in mammals, who was active in South America, the United States and Australia. Stirton was closely associated with the University of California Museum of Paleontology, receiving an appointment as curator in 1930 and as its fourth director from 1949 to 1966. His career also saw engaged as a lecturer, associate professorship and then as a professor in 1951, from which time he was director of the University's Department of Paleontology.

#17119

Fred Alexander Barkley

1908 - 1989 (81 years)

Fred Alexander Barkley was an American botanist. Barkley studied at the University of Oklahoma and was awarded a PhD from the Washington University in St. Louis in 1937.

#17120

Henry Bryant Bigelow

1879 - 1967 (88 years)

Henry Bryant Bigelow was an American oceanographer and marine biologist. He is the grandson of Henry Bryant who was an American physician and naturalist. After graduating from Harvard in 1901, he began working with famed ichthyologist Alexander Agassiz. Bigelow accompanied Agassiz on several major marine science expeditions including one aboard the Albatross in 1907. He began working at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1905 and joined Harvard's faculty in 1906 where he worked for 62 years.

#17121

Curtis P. Clausen

1893 - 1976 (83 years)

Curtis Paul Clausen was an American entomologist and professor at the University of California, Riverside, who specialized in biological control. He wrote an influential text on the biology of insect predators and parasites, Entomophagous Insects .

#17122

Emma Lucy Braun

Emma Lucy Braun

1889 - 1971 (82 years)

E. Lucy Braun was a prominent botanist, ecologist, and expert on the forests of the eastern United States who was a professor of the University of Cincinnati. She was the first woman to be elected President of the Ecological Society of America, in 1950. She was an environmentalist before the term was popularized, and a pioneering woman in her field, winning many awards for her work.

#17123

Hilbrand Boschma

Hilbrand Boschma

1893 - 1976 (83 years)

Hilbrand Boschma was a Dutch zoologist and director of the Rijksmuseum of Natural History in Leiden. Boschma studied botany and zoology at the University of Amsterdam. He went to the former Dutch East Indies, where he studied embryology, functional morphology in reptiles and amphibians, and stony corals. He joined a Danish expedition to the Kai Islands in 1922 as an associate of the Danish zoologist Dr. Th. Mortensen and sampled and studied corals. He is taxon author of several different species of fire corals.

#17124

Walter Rudolf Hess

Walter Rudolf Hess

1881 - 1973 (92 years)

Walter Rudolf Hess was a Swiss physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949 for mapping the areas of the brain involved in the control of internal organs. He shared the prize with Egas Moniz.

#17125

Angus M. Woodbury

Angus M. Woodbury

1886 - 1964 (78 years)

Angus Munn Woodbury was an American zoologist and ecologist from Utah. He was professor at the University of Utah for over 20 years, and also worked for many years as a ranger-naturalist at Zion National Park. He produced over 100 publications, many focused on the biology of reptiles and birds, but also on insects, ecological succession, and the history of Utah. He and his wife of 55 years, Grace Atkin Woodbury, died in an automobile collision on August 1, 1964, near Loveland, Colorado.

#17126

Winifred Cullis

Winifred Cullis

1875 - 1956 (81 years)

Winifred Cullis was a physiologist and academic, and the first woman to hold a professorial chair at a medical school. Early life and education Born in Gloucester, Winifred was the youngest daughter of the six children of Frederick John and Louisa Cullis. Her brother Cuthbert Edmund Cullis became a mathematician. The family moved to Birmingham in 1880. She was initially educated at a middle school, the Summer Hill School, and at 16 transferred to the associated King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham and took extra science classes at Mason College.

#17127

Llewellyn Ivor Price

1905 - 1980 (75 years)

Llewellyn Ivor Price was one of the first Brazilian paleontologists. His work contributed not only to the development of Brazilian but also to global paleontology. He collected Staurikosaurus in 1936, the first dinosaur discovered in Brazil.

#17128

Sanshi Imai

1900 - 1976 (76 years)

was a Japanese mycologist of Hokkaido Imperial University. Eponymous taxa Clitocybe imaianaImaiaLactarius imaianusStropharia imaiana Selected publications Sanshi Imai "On the Clavariaceae of Japan: I". Transactions of the Sapporo Natural History Society Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 38–45.Sanshi Imai "On the Clavariaceae of Japan: II". Transactions of the Sapporo Natural History Society Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 70–77.Sanshi Imai "On the Clavariaceae of Japan: III. The species of Clavaria found in Hokkaido and Southern Saghalien". Transactions of the Sapporo Natural History Society Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 9–12.Sanshi Imai "Contributions to the knowledge of the classification of the Helvellaceae".

#17129

Embrik Strand

1876 - 1947 (71 years)

Embrik Strand was an entomologist and arachnologist who classified many insect and spider species including the greenbottle blue tarantula. Life and career Strand was born in Ål, Norway. He studied at the University of Kristiania . Around 1900 he focused on collecting insect specimens from Norway. These are now deposited at the university's museum, where he worked as a curator from 1901 to 1903.

#17130

Gilbert L. Voss

1918 - 1989 (71 years)

Gilbert L. Voss was an American conservationist and oceanographer. He was one of the main persons behind the establishment of John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in Florida and he spoke out successfully against several proposed real estate developments that might have threatened the ecology of the Florida Keys.

#17131

Ragna Rask-Nielsen

1900 - 1998 (98 years)

Ragna Marie Jenny Rask-Nielsen née Jensen was a Danish biochemist and medical researcher. After she earned a PhD with a dissertation on the development of carcinogenic tumors in mice in 1948, she carried out laboratory-based studies on antibody-producing tumors. In 1963, her groundbreaking work on viruses causing cancerous lymphoma was published in the journal Nature. When she died at the age of 97, she left her large fortune to a research foundation.

#17132

Gustav Aschaffenburg

Gustav Aschaffenburg

1866 - 1944 (78 years)

Gustav Aschaffenburg was a German psychiatrist born in Zweibrücken. In 1890 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Strasbourg with a thesis on delirium tremens. Later he worked as an assistant to Emil Kraepelin at the psychiatric university clinic in Heidelberg, with whom he later extensively wrote about Haltlose personality disorder. He then practiced psychiatric medicine at the University of Halle and at the Akademie für praktische Medizin in Cologne .

#17133

Rosalind Wulzen

Rosalind Wulzen

1886 - Present (140 years)

Rosalind Wulzen was an American physiologist, known for her discovery of the "Anti-Stiffness Factor," or "Wulzen Factor." Born in Oakland, California, Wulzen attended the University of California Berkeley for her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.

#17134

Heinz-Günter Wittmann

1927 - 1990 (63 years)

Heinz-Günter Wittmann was a German biochemist known for his research in ribosomes.

#17135

T. K. G. Herzog

1880 - 1961 (81 years)

Theodor Carl Julius Herzog was a German bryologist and phytogeographer. This botanist is denoted by the author abbreviation Herz. when citing a botanical name. Biography He studied sciences in Freiburg and Zürich, obtaining his doctorate in 1903 from the University of Munich as a student of botanist Ludwig Radlkofer . Later on, he obtained his habilitation at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich under the sponsorship of Carl Joseph Schröter .

#17136

Angélique Arvanitaki

1901 - 1983 (82 years)

Angélique Arvanitaki was a French neurophysiologist who did research on the electrical activity of neurons using the large nerve fibres of several different molluscs. Life Angélique Arvanitaki was of Greek origin and was born in Cairo on 11 July 1901. In 1942, she married Nick Chalazonitis, who was a student in veterinary medicine at the time, and would himself become a neurophysiologist too. Their daughter Alcmene Chalazonitis, born in 1943, later also became a neuroscientist.

#17137

Jean Laigret

1893 - 1966 (73 years)

Jean Laigret was a French biologist born in Blois. Biography He was a student of the École principale du service de Santé de la Marine at Bordeaux, and during World War I, served in the infantry. In 1915 he sustained war wounds, receiving the Croix de Guerre. In 1919 he defended his doctoral thesis with Contribution à la prophylaxie de la syphilis. From 1921 to 1923 he worked at a hospital in Brazzaville, Middle Congo, subsequently becoming an assistant at the Pasteur Institute in Brazzaville. Here he worked on a treatment for trypanosomiasis by testing orsanine and suramine that were develop...

#17138

Donald Putnam Abbott

1920 - 1986 (66 years)

Donald Putnam Abbott was an invertebrate zoologist and professor of biology at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University from 1950 through 1982. He earned his Ph.D. under S. F. Light and Ralph Smith at the University of California, Berkeley. Abbott was an expert on ascidian tunicates and an authority on all forms of invertebrate animals. He was an influential teacher, researcher, author, and student mentor. His wife, Isabella Abbott, was a world authority on marine algae of the Pacific.

#17139

Adolf Naef

1883 - 1949 (66 years)

Adolf Naef was a Swiss zoologist and palaeontologist who worked on cephalopods and systematics. Although he struggled with academic politics throughout his career and difficult conditions during World War I and II, his work had lasting influences on the fields of phylogenetics, morphology, and embryology.

#17140

Archibald Durward

1902 - 1964 (62 years)

Archibald Durward, MD, FRSE was a Scottish anatomist who was Professor of Anatomy at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Durward was born on 6 April 1902 in Denny, Stirlingshire, Scotland, the son of The Reverend Peter C Durward MA and his wife Elizabeth . The family emigrated to New Zealand in 1906, originally to Leeston and then to Lawrence in October 1911. His father deputised for the Moderator at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand in 1916.

#17141

Robert Douglas Lockhart

1894 - 1987 (93 years)

Prof Robert Douglas Lockhart FRSE LLD FSAS was a 20th-century Scottish anatomist. He served as president of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1955–57. He was also the official Curator of the Marischal Museum.

#17142

Helen Margaret Gilkey

1886 - 1972 (86 years)

Helen Margaret Gilkey was an American mycologist and botanist, as well as a botanical illustrator and watercolor artist She was born on March 6, 1886, in Montesano, Washington, and moved to Corvallis, Oregon, with her family in 1903. She died in 1972 at the age of 86.

#17143

Margaret Clay Ferguson

Margaret Clay Ferguson

1863 - 1951 (88 years)

Margaret Clay Ferguson was an American botanist best known for advancing scientific education in the field of botany. She also contributed on the life histories of North American pines. Early life and education Ferguson was born in Orleans, New York in 1863 and attended the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York. Ferguson attended Wellesley College, where she graduated in botany and chemistry in 1891, earning a PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1901.

#17144

James Francis Macbride

1892 - 1976 (84 years)

James Francis Macbride was an American botanist who devoted most of his professional life to the study of the flora of Peru. Early life and education Born on 19 May 1892 in Rock Valley, Iowa, Macbride graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1914 and worked briefly at the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University.

#17145

Benedictus Hubertus Danser

1891 - 1943 (52 years)

Benedictus Hubertus Danser , often abbreviated B. H. Danser, was a Dutch taxonomist and botanist. Danser specialised in the plant families Loranthaceae, Nepenthaceae, and Polygonaceae. In 1928, Danser published an exhaustive revision of the genus Nepenthes, recognising 65 species in "The Nepenthaceae of the Netherlands Indies". While nowadays more than 140 species of Nepenthes are known, Danser's work is still referenced by specialists in the field.

#17146

Vladimir V. Tchernavin

Vladimir V. Tchernavin

1887 - 1949 (62 years)

Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Tchernavin was a Russian-born ichthyologist who became famous as one of the first and few prisoners of the Soviet Gulag system to escape abroad. Background Tchernavin was born in 1887 in Tsarskoye Selo, near St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, into a noble family of modest means. After his father died in 1902 he took part as a collector-zoologist in expeditions to the Altai region with the Russian explorer Vasili Sapozhnikov. Later he became the leader in a series of scientific expeditions to the Altai Mountain and Sayanskii Mountain, Mongolia, the Tian Shan Mountains, ...

#17147

Elizabeth Eaton Morse

1864 - 1955 (91 years)

Elizabeth Eaton Morse was an American mycologist. Born in Framingham, Massachusetts, she graduated from Ashland, Massachusetts, High School in 1882. For seven years she taught in elementary school before entering Wellesley College, from which she graduated with a diploma from the School of Art in 1891. After twenty years of teaching in the New York City schools Morris High School and Roosevelt High School, she returned to Wellesley College in 1924 and earned a degree in Botany in 1926. Shortly after, she registered as a part-time graduate student in the Department of Botany at the University ...

#17148

Carl Skottsberg

Carl Skottsberg

1880 - 1963 (83 years)

Carl Johan Fredrik Skottsberg was a Swedish botanist and explorer of Antarctica. Life Skottsberg was born in Karlshamn on 1 December 1880 the son of Carl Adolf Skottsberg a schoolmaster and his wife, Maria Louisa Pfeiffer.

#17149

Heinrich Walter

1898 - 1989 (91 years)

Heinrich Karl Walter was a German-Russian botanist and eco-physiologist. Life Walter, the son of a doctor, was born in Odessa. He studied plant biology at the University of Odessa from 1915 to 1917. In 1918 he moved to the University of Dorpat, where he studied under Peter Claussen. In 1919 he studied at the University of Jena with Christian Ernst Stahl and Wilhelm Detmer, where he completed his Ph.D. In 1920, he worked at the Agricultural Research Institute in Halle, and then as a research assistant of Ludwig Jost at the University of Heidelberg.

#17150

Margery C. Carlson

Margery C. Carlson

1892 - 1985 (93 years)

Margery Claire Carlson was an American botanist and a professor at Northwestern University. After earning a Ph.D. in botany and becoming the first full-time female professor at Northwestern, she went on a number of international scientific expeditions to Central America in order to collect plant specimens and find new species. Her relationship as a research assistant at the Field Museum of Natural History meant that a majority of her plant collection was donated to the museum and a special botany collection was created for her there. Carlson had a long history of involvement in the conservati...

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