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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,

#17351

William Keeton

1933 - 1980 (47 years)

William Tinsley Keeton was an American zoologist known internationally for his work on animal behavior, especially bird migration, and for his work on millipede taxonomy. He was a well-liked professor of biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and author of a widely used introductory textbook, Biological Science.

#17352

Robert Fiske Griggs

1881 - 1962 (81 years)

Robert Fiske Griggs , was a botanist who led a 1915 National Geographic Society expedition to observe the aftermath of the Katmai volcanic eruption. National Geographic expeditions In June 1917, Griggs and the eager NGS explorers rushed to the Katmai coast with the express goal of exploring the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. They quickly worked their way up through the ash-filled Katmai River valley and over the pass. It was a month of terror and elation for the twelve adventurers. Through the long Alaska summer days, they took chemical and geologic samples, shot photographs, and made rough maps.

#17353

Lawrence Rogers Blinks

1900 - 1989 (89 years)

Lawrence Rogers Blinks was an American biologist with research interests in photosynthesis and electrophysiology. He served as the editor of the Annual Review of Plant Physiology for 1956. Life and education Lawrence Rogers Blinks was born in Michigan City, Indiana, on 22 April 1900 to parents Walter Moulton Blinks and Ella Little Blinks. He attended Kalamazoo College and Stanford University, before attending Harvard University where he was awarded a BS in 1923 and MA in 1925. He also completed his PhD at Harvard in 1926 under the direction of Winthrop Osterhout. Blinks married botanist Anne Catherine Hof in 1928 and they had one son.

#17354

Chester Stock

1892 - 1950 (58 years)

Chester Stock was an American paleontologist who specialized in the Pleistocene mammalian fauna of the Rancho La Brea tar pits. He served as a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

#17355

Guy Frederic Marrian

Guy Frederic Marrian

1904 - 1981 (77 years)

Frederic Guy Marrian CBE FRS FRSE FIC was a British biochemist mainly known for his research into oestregen. Life He was born in London on 3 March 1904 the son of Mary Eddington Currie and Frederic York Marrian, a civil engineer. He was educated at Tollington School for Boys in London then Leys School in Cambridge. He then studied Sciences at the University of London graduating with a BSc in 1925. He then went to work as a laboratory assistant to Dr Henry Dale at the National Institute of Medical Research in Hampstead.

#17356

Erwin Stresemann

Erwin Stresemann

1889 - 1972 (83 years)

Erwin Friedrich Theodor Stresemann was a German naturalist and ornithologist. Stresemann was an ornithologist of extensive breadth who compiled one of the first and most comprehensive accounts of avian biology of its time as part of the Handbuch der Zoologie . In the process of his studies on birds, he also produced one of the most extensive historical accounts on the development of the science of ornithology. He influenced numerous ornithologists around him and oversaw the development of ornithology in Germany as editor of the Journal für Ornithologie. He also took an interest in poetry, philosophy and linguistics.

#17357

Geoffrey Harris

1913 - 1971 (58 years)

Geoffrey Wingfield Harris was a British physiologist and neuroendocrinologist. Often considered the "father of neuroendocrinology", he is best known for showing that the anterior pituitary is regulated by the hypothalamus via the hypophyseal portal system. His work established the principles for the 1977 Nobel Prize-winning discovery of hypothalamic hormones by Schally and Guillemin.

#17358

Emmett Reid Dunn

1894 - 1956 (62 years)

Emmett Reid Dunn was an American herpetologist and educator noted for his work in Panama and for studies of salamanders in the Eastern United States. Early life and education Emmett Reid Dunn was born on November 21, 1894, in Arlington, Virginia, to Mary Reid Dunn and Emmett Clark Dunn, a civil engineer. He spent much of his childhood at a family farm near the James River in Nelson County. Dunn attended Haverford College in Philadelphia, receiving his B.A. and M.A. in 1915 and 1916, respectively. His childhood connection to Arlington allowed him to connect with his first professional mentor, Leonhard Stejneger, the Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians at the Smithsonian Institution.

#17359

Douglas Wright

1907 - 1990 (83 years)

Sir Roy Douglas Wright was an Australian physiologist and eminent academic administrator. Biography He was born in Central Castra, Tasmania. He became Professor of Physiology at the University of Melbourne from 1939 to 1971 and was later Chancellor of the University from 1980 to 1989. He advised the leaders of the optometry profession who were responsible for setting up the Victorian College of Optometry in 1939 and 1940 and helped plan the first four-year optometry course. He was involved again when the optometry course was transferred to the university.

#17360

Ernest Basil Verney

1894 - 1967 (73 years)

Ernest Basil Verney FRS was a British pharmacologist. He was born in Cardiff, Wales and attended Tonbridge School and Cambridge University, where he was awarded MA and MB. He was Sheilds Reader in Pharmacology, University of Cambridge and Professor of Pharmacology at the University of London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and delivered their Goulstonian Lecture on Polyuria in 1929.

#17361

Ernst Pringsheim Jr.

1881 - 1970 (89 years)

Ernst Pringsheim Jr. or Ernst Georg Pringsheim was a German Natural scientist and plant physiology. He taught as a professor for biochemistry and botany, in the University of Berlin, University of Prague, and Cambridge University.

#17362

Donald R. Whitehead

1938 - 1990 (52 years)

Donald Robert Whitehead was an American entomologist, who specialized in the study of the biogeography and systematics of weevils. Whitehead was awarded his Bachelor of Science degree in 1961, from Rutgers University, and his PhD from the University of Alberta in 1971.

#17363

Albert Chibnall

Albert Chibnall

1894 - 1988 (94 years)

Albert Charles Chibnall FRS was a British biochemist known for his work on the nitrogen metabolism of plants. Life and career Albert Charles Chibnall was born on 28 January 1894 in Hammersmith, the second son of George William Chibnall, bakery owner, and Kate Butler. The first and third sons were both killed in action in WWI. The oldest child was Isabella Rachel ; there were also two girls who died in infancy.

#17364

Alexis Hartmann

1898 - 1964 (66 years)

Alexis Frank Hartmann Sr. was an American pediatrician and clinical biochemist. He is best known for adding sodium lactate to Ringer's solution, creating what is now known as Ringer's lactate solution or Hartmann's solution for intravenous infusions.

#17365

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.

#17366

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.

#17367

Sewall Wright

1889 - 1988 (99 years)

Sewall Green Wright FRS Honorary FRSE was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. He was a founder of population genetics alongside Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, which was a major step in the development of the modern synthesis combining genetics with evolution. He discovered the inbreeding coefficient and methods of computing it in pedigree animals. He extended this work to populations, computing the amount of inbreeding between members of populations as a result of random genetic drift, and along with Fisher ...

#17368

Nathan O. Kaplan

1917 - 1986 (69 years)

Nathan Oram Kaplan was an American biochemist who studied enzymology and chemotherapy. Biography After completing a B.A. in chemistry at UCLA in 1939, Kaplan studied carbohydrate metabolism in the liver under David M. Greenberg at the University of California, Berkeley medical school. He earned his Ph.D. in 1943. From 1942 to 1944, Kaplan participated in the Manhattan Project, and then spent a year as an instructor at Wayne State University. From 1945 to 1949, Kaplan worked with Fritz Lipmann, G. David Novelli, and Beverly Guirard to study coenzyme A. Kaplan went to the University of Illi...

#17369

René Dubos

1901 - 1982 (81 years)

René Jules Dubos was a French-American microbiologist, experimental pathologist, environmentalist, humanist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book So Human An Animal. He is credited for having made famous the environmental maxim: "Think globally, act locally." Aside from a period from 1942 to 1944 when he was George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology and professor of tropical medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, his scientific career was spent entirely at The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, later renamed The...

#17370

Paul Alfred Weiss

Paul Alfred Weiss

1898 - 1989 (91 years)

Paul Alfred Weiss was an Austrian biologist who specialised in morphogenesis, development, differentiation and neurobiology. A teacher, experimenter and theorist, he made a lasting contribution to science in his lengthy career, throughout which he sought to encourage specialists in different fields to meet and share insights.

#17371

Sam Ruben

1913 - 1943 (30 years)

Samuel Ruben was an American chemist who with Martin Kamen co-discovered the synthesis of the isotope carbon-14 in 1940. Early life Ruben was the son of Herschel and Frieda Penn Rubenstein – the name was officially shortened to Ruben in 1930. Young Sam developed a friendship with neighbor Jack Dempsey and became involved with a local boys' boxing club and later, when the family moved across the Bay to Berkeley, he was a successful basketball player at Berkeley High School . After achieving his B.S. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, he continued his studies there and was awarded a Ph.D.

#17372

Nicolas Rashevsky

1899 - 1972 (73 years)

Nicolas Rashevsky was an American theoretical physicist who was one of the pioneers of mathematical biology, and is also considered the father of mathematical biophysics and theoretical biology. Academic career He studied theoretical physics at the St. Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev. He left Ukraine after the October Revolution, emigrating first to Turkey, then to Poland, France, and finally to the US in 1924.

#17373

Kenneth Mather

1911 - 1990 (79 years)

Sir Kenneth Mather CBE FRS was a British geneticist and botanist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1949, and won its Darwin Medal in 1964. He was the second vice chancellor of the University of Southampton, serving from 1965 to 1971. He was instrumental in persuading the University Grants Committee to establish a new Medical School at the university.

#17374

Edward Oliver Essig

1884 - 1964 (80 years)

Edward Oliver Essig was an American entomologist who specialized in the Hemiptera. Essig was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote Injurious and Beneficial Insects of California , Insects of Western North America , A History of Entomology , College Entomology and several hundred scientific works on Hemiptera.The Essig Museum of Entomology at UC Berkeley is named for him. He was also interested in horticulture and wrote A check-list of Fuchsias. American Fuchsia Society .

#17375

Carl J. Wiggers

1883 - 1963 (80 years)

Carl J. Wiggers was a doctor and medical researcher famous for his heart and blood-pressure research. He developed the Wiggers diagram, which is commonly used in teaching of cardiovascular research.

#17376

William Ogilvy Kermack

1898 - 1970 (72 years)

William Ogilvy Kermack FRS FRSE FRIC was a Scottish biochemist. He made mathematical studies of epidemic spread and established links between environmental factors and specified diseases. He is noteworthy for being blind for the majority of his academic career. Together with Anderson Gray McKendrick he created the Kermack-McKendrick theory of infectious diseases.

#17377

Macfarlane Burnet

Macfarlane Burnet

1899 - 1985 (86 years)

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet , usually known as Macfarlane or Mac Burnet, was an Australian virologist known for his contributions to immunology. He won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for predicting acquired immune tolerance and he developed the theory of clonal selection.

#17378

Juda Hirsch Quastel

1899 - 1987 (88 years)

Juda Hirsch Quastel, was a British-Canadian biochemist who pioneered diverse research in neurochemistry, soil metabolism, cellular metabolism, and cancer. Biography Quastel, also known as "Harry" or "Q," was born at Ecclesall Road in Sheffield the son of Jonas Quastel, a confectioner, and his wife, Flora Itcovitz. His parents had come to Britain in 1897 from Tarnopol in Galicia and were married in Britain. He was named after his grandfather, Juda Quastel, a chemist in Tarnapol.

#17379

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.

#17380

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 ...

#17381

Dennis Robert Hoagland

1884 - 1949 (65 years)

Dennis Robert Hoagland was an American chemist and plant and soil scientist working in the fields of plant nutrition, soil chemistry, agricultural chemistry, biochemistry, and physiology. He was Professor of Plant Nutrition at the University of California at Berkeley from 1927 until his death in 1949.

#17382

Hallowell Davis

1896 - 1992 (96 years)

Hallowell Davis was an American physiologist, otolaryngologist and researcher who did pioneering work on the physiology of hearing and the inner ear. He served as director of research at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, Missouri.

#17383

George Beadle

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

George Wells Beadle was an American geneticist. In 1958 he shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward Tatum for their discovery of the role of genes in regulating biochemical events within cells. He also served as the 7th President of the University of Chicago.

#17384

Stanley Cobb

1887 - 1968 (81 years)

Stanley Cobb was a neurologist and could be considered "the founder of biological psychiatry in the United States". Early life Cobb was born on December 10, 1887, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to John Candler Cobb. His great-grandmother, Augusta Adams Cobb, abandoned her husband and married Mormon prophet Brigham Young as his third wife in 1843. Cobb's childhood and education were affected by his stammer, which it is suggested led him to study the neurosciences in an attempt to understand its cause. He married Elizabeth Mason Almy in 1915.

#17385

Ralph W. Gerard

1900 - 1974 (74 years)

Ralph Waldo Gerard was an American neurophysiologist and behavioral scientist known for his wide-ranging work on the nervous system, nerve metabolism, psychopharmacology, and biological basis of schizophrenia.

#17386

Maurice Ewing

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

William Maurice "Doc" Ewing was an American geophysicist and oceanographer. Ewing has been described as a pioneering geophysicist who worked on the research of seismic reflection and refraction in ocean basins, ocean bottom photography, submarine sound transmission , deep sea core samples of the ocean bottom, theory and observation of earthquake surface wavess, fluidity of the Earth's core, generation and propagation of microseismss, submarine explosion seismology, marine gravity surveys, bathymetry and sedimentation, natural radioactivity of ocean waters and sediments, study of abyssal plain...

#17387

Karl Meyer

1899 - 1990 (91 years)

Karl Meyer was a German biochemist. He worked on connective tissue and determined the properties of hyaluronan in the 1930s. Biography He was born on 4 September 1899 in Kerpen, Germany. Meyer studied medicine and received his Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in 1924. He moved to Berlin and received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1927. In 1930 Herbert Evans invited Meyer to work as assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He then moved to New York and worked at the Columbia University doing research on hyaluronan.

#17388

Alexis Carrel

1873 - 1944 (71 years)

Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. Carrel was also a pioneer in transplantology and thoracic surgery. He is known for his leading role in implementing eugenic policies in Vichy France.

#17389

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

1901 - 1972 (71 years)

Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory . This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934, is still in use today.

#17390

Joseph Charles Bequaert

Joseph Charles Bequaert

1886 - 1982 (96 years)

Joseph Charles Bequaert was an American naturalist of Belgian origin, born 24 May 1886 in Torhout and died on 12 January 1982 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Career Bequaert obtained a doctorate in botany at the University of Ghent in 1908. He was an entomologist, and from 1910 to 1912 he was part of la commission Belge sur la maladie du sommeil . From 1913 to 1915 he worked as a botanist in the Belgian Congo and also collected mollusks.

#17391

Maurice Yonge

1899 - 1986 (87 years)

Sir Charles Maurice Yonge, CBE, FRS FRSE was an English marine zoologist. Life Charles Maurice Yonge was born in Silcoates School near Wakefield in Yorkshire in 1899 the son of John Arthur Yonge and his wife, Sarah Edith Carr. He was educated at Silcoates School, where his father was headmaster.

#17392

Roger Stanier

1916 - 1982 (66 years)

Roger Yate Stanier was a Canadian microbiologist who was influential in the development of modern microbiology. As a member of the Delft School and former student of C. B. van Niel, he made important contributions to the taxonomy of bacteria, including the classification of blue-green algae as cyanobacteria. In 1957, he and co-authors wrote The Microbial World, an influential microbiology textbook which was published in five editions over three decades. In the course of 24 years at the University of California, Berkeley he reached the rank of professor and served as chair of the Department of Bacteriology before leaving for the Pasteur Institute in 1971.

#17393

Albert Baird Hastings

1895 - 1987 (92 years)

Albert Baird Hastings was an American biochemist and physiologist. He spent 28 years as the department chair and Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard University. After retiring from Harvard, Hastings moved to the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation , where he became the director of the division of biochemistry and helped to establish the institution's emerging program in basic research. In 1966, he became one of the first faculty members at the University of California, San Diego's new medical school. His research focused on the biochemical underpinnings of physiology...

#17394

Selig Hecht

1892 - 1947 (55 years)

Selig Hecht was an American physiologist who studied photochemistry in photoreceptor cells. Life Hecht was born in Glogau, then in the German Empire , the son of Mandel Hecht and Mary Mresse. The family migrated to the USA in 1898, settling in New York City. His studies and talents led to Columbia University making him professor of biophysics in 1928.

#17395

Edward Tatum

1909 - 1975 (66 years)

Edward Lawrie Tatum was an American geneticist. He shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958 with George Beadle for showing that genes control individual steps in metabolism. The other half of that year's award went to Joshua Lederberg. Tatum was an elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#17396

Kjell Kleppe

1934 - 1988 (54 years)

Kjell Kleppe was a Norwegian biochemist and molecular biologist who was a pioneer in the polymerase chain reaction technique and built the first laboratory in the country for bio- and gene technology.

#17397

Elmer McCollum

1879 - 1967 (88 years)

Elmer Verner McCollum was an American biochemist known for his work on the influence of diet on health. McCollum is also remembered for starting the first rat colony in the United States to be used for nutrition research. His reputation has suffered from posthumous controversy. Time magazine called him Dr.Vitamin. His rule was, "Eat what you want after you have eaten what you should."

#17398

William John Crozier

1892 - 1955 (63 years)

William John Crozier was an American physiologist who contributed to the field of psychology through his works on animal behaviour and sensory processes. Crozier spent the time between 1918–1925 as a professor at different schools including the University of Illinois Medical School and the University of Chicago. In 1927, he became a professor at Harvard where he worked until he retired. He ran a General Physiology laboratory at the University of Harvard, which attracted many young researchers, the most notable being B.F. Skinner.

#17399

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.

#17400

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.

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