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.

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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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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1801

Jack Hirsh

#36482

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Jack Hirsh is a Canadian clinician and scientist specializing in anticoagulant therapy and thrombosis. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Hirsh is a graduate of the University of Melbourne Medical School. He studied hematology at Washington University in St. Louis, the London Postgraduate Medical School and the University of Toronto. In 1973 he joined the Faculty of Medicine of McMaster University. He is also the Director of the Hamilton Civic Hospital Research Centre.

#1802

Robert McCarley

#28711

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Robert W. McCarley, MD, was Chair and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the VA Boston Healthcare System. He is also Director of the Laboratory of Neuroscience located at the Brockton VA Medical Center and the McLean Hospital. McClarley was a prominent researcher in the field of sleep and dreaming as well as schizophrenia.

#1803

Gerald R. Allen

#29524

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gerald Robert "Gerry" Allen is an American-born Australian ichthyologist. His career began in 1963, when he spent a semester at the University of Hawaii, where he also received a PhD in marine zoology in 1971. In 1972, Allen wrote his doctoral thesis on the systematics and biology of the anemone fish.

#1804

Michael Elowitz

#31992

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Michael B. Elowitz is a biologist and professor of Biology, Bioengineering, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Genius grant, better known as the MacArthur Fellows Program for the design of a synthetic gene regulatory network, the Repressilator, which helped initiate the field of synthetic biology. He was the first to show how inherently random effects, or 'noise', in gene expression could be detected and quantified in living cells, leading to a growing recognition of the many roles that noise plays in living cells.

#1805

Yehudith Birk

#27181

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Yehudith Birk was a Polish-born Israeli biochemist, awarded the 1998 Israel Prize for agricultural research. Biography Yehudith Gershtanski was born in Grajewo, Poland to Frida and Yitzhak Gershtanski , both ardent Zionist activists. Frida was an accountant and Baruch was a businessman. The family immigrated to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1935, settling in Tel Aviv. Gershtanski attended the school for workers’ children on Lasalle Street in Tel Aviv. She studied for a master's degree in biochemistry and microbiology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, completing her degree in December 1950.

#1806

Kurt Hirschhorn

#20770

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Kurt Hirschhorn was an Austrian-born American pediatrician, medical geneticist, and cytogeneticist who identified the chromosomal defects that underlie Wolf–Hirschhorn syndrome. Early life Hirschhorn was born in Vienna. Fleeing anti-Semitic persecution, the family relocated to Switzerland, then to the US, briefly in New York City before settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

#1807

Marc G. Caron

#54803

Overall Influence

1946 - 2022 (76 years)

Marc G. Caron was a Canadian-born American researcher and James B. Duke Professor of Cell Biology at Duke University. He was one of the top highly cited researchers according to webometrics. Caron died on April 25, 2022, aged 75.

#1808

Ralph S. Baric

#47157

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ralph Steven Baric is William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, and professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#1809

Michael Neuberger

#26485

Overall Influence

1953 - 2013 (60 years)

Michael Samuel Neuberger FRS FMedSci was a British biochemist and immunologist. Biography Born in Kensington, Michael Samuel Neuberger was the fourth of five children of Albert Neuberger and Lilian Ida . He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Natural Sciences in 1974. Neuberger then joined Brian Hartley at Imperial College to study for his PhD. During this time, and at Hartley’s suggestion, he visited the South African biologist Sydney Brenner at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Their...

#1810

Enrico Coen

#35481

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Enrico Sandro Coen is a British biologist who studies the mechanisms used by plants to create complex and varied flower structures. Coen's research has aimed to define the developmental rules that govern flower and leaf growth at both the cellular level and throughout the whole plant to better understand evolution. He has combined molecular, genetic and imaging studies with population and ecological models and computational analysis to understand flower development.

#1811

Paul Brehm

#39821

Overall Influence

Paul Brehm is a researcher at the Vollum Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. It was during a seminar by Brehm that Martin Chalfie became inspired to work on Green fluorescent protein for which Chalfie shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008.

#1812

Jaap Goudsmit

#26332

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jaap Goudsmit is Dutch scientist, known for his research in the field of AIDS and influenza. He shifted his research interest to aging and neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's Disease. He is also a prolific writer of non-fiction books: Viral Sex, the Nature of AIDS ; Viral Fitness, the Next SARS and West Nile in the Making ; Serendipity Manual ; The Vaccine Bug, a personal history of the World of Immunity ; Immorbidity Alphabet, Spelling-out a life free of dis-ease ; The Time of your Life, Staying healthy to the End and The Art of Facing Mortality, a scientist's view .

#1813

Philip Scheltens

#45429

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Philip Scheltens is a Dutch professor of neurology and founder of the Alzheimer Centre, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, location VUmc in Amsterdam. Early life, education and career Philip Scheltens was born in Dordrecht, Netherlands, where he grew up in a family of four. His father led a factory. His grandfather developed Alzheimer’s disease in those years, which made an impression on his grandson. Philip attended the Christelijk Lyceum, where he graduated in 1976. As a teenager he was an enthusiastic drummer in several bands and was fascinated by science and mechanics.

#1814

Eleftherios Diamandis

#21269

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Eleftherios Phedias Diamandis is a Greek Cypriot-Canadian biochemist who specializes in clinical chemistry. He is Professor & Head of Clinical Biochemistry in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is also Division Head of Clinical Biochemistry at Mount Sinai Hospital and Biochemist-in-Chief at the University Health Network, both of which are also located in Toronto.

#1815

Ralf Bartenschlager

#55589

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager is a German virologist who has been researching hepatitis C since 1989. He is a professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Heidelberg University. Early life Bartenschlager grew up in Mannheim. After high school, he worked as a policemen for four years before starting his undergraduate in biology in 1981 at Heidelberg University. He conduced his thesis work with Heinz Schaller at the ZMBH in Heidelberg on the structure and functional role of the P-protein in Hepatitis B viruses. After graduating in 1990, he continued working as a postdoc at Heidelberg U...

#1816

S. Lawrence Zipursky

#42162

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

S. Lawrence Zipursky is an American neuroscientist, currently Distinguished Professor of Biological Chemistry at University of California, Los Angeles and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Zipursky studies brain development. His research focuses on how neural circuits are formed during development. His laboratory has provided insights into various aspects of circuit assembly, including the molecular basis of neuronal identity through their work on the Dscam1 locus in Drosophila. Zipursky was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

#1817

Leonid Sazanov

#35241

Overall Influence

Leonid A. Sazanov is a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria . Sazanov research explores the structure and function of large membrane protein complexes from the domain of bioenergetics. These molecular machines interconvert redox energy and proton motive force across biological membranes using a variety of mechanisms.

#1818

Albert Aguayo

#31149

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Albert Juan Aguayo is a Canadian neurologist at McGill University. Albert Juan Aguayo is a Canadian neurologist at McGill University. Hailing from the Bahia Blanca in Argentina, Dr. Aguayo graduated in medicine from the National University of Córdoba. After graduating from Argentina, Aguayo continued to train in neurology, working as an assistant physician in Neurology University of Toronto and McGill University. In the year 1967, McGill University appointed Aguayo as assistant professor in the department of Neurology and Neurosurgery. From the years 2000 to 2005, Aguayo served as the Secr...

#1819

Juan Luis Arsuaga

Juan Luis Arsuaga

#26992

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras is a Spanish paleoanthropologist and author known for his work in the Atapuerca Archaeological Site. He obtained a master's degree and a doctorate in Biological Sciences at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he is professor in the Paleontology Department of the Faculty of Geological Sciences.

#1820

Otmar Wiestler

#42023

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Otmar D. Wiestler is a German physician, a professor at the University of Heidelberg and president of the Helmholtz Association. He is not a typical basic scientist, but he successfully entered a number of highly popular fields of clinical research, including cancer research, tumor genetics and, more recently, stem cell research. He focuses on technology transfer of already existing technologies from basic science into clinical use, rather than developing the basic science.

#1821

Axel Prof. Dr. Ullrich

#56052

Overall Influence

#1822

Tali Sharot

#17512

Overall Influence

Tali Sharot is an Israeli/British/American neuroscientist and professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. Sharot began studying at Tel Aviv University, receiving a B.A. in economics in 1999, and an M.A. in psychology from New York University in 2002. She received her Ph.D in psychology and neuroscience from New York University. Sharot is known for her research on the neural basis of emotion, decision making and optimism. Sharot hopes to better understand these processes to enhance overall well-being.

#1823

Tracy L. Johnson

#48618

Overall Influence

Tracy L. Johnson is the Keith and Cecilia Terasaki Presidential Endowed Chair in the Life Sciences and Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles . She is also a professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In May 2020, she was named Dean of the UCLA Division of Life Sciences.

#1824

Jonathan Gershenzon

Jonathan Gershenzon

#53425

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jonathan Gershenzon is an American biochemist. Scientific career After studying biology as an undergraduate at the University of California in Santa Cruz, Gershenzon received his PhD in botany from the University of Texas in 1984. From 1985 until 1997 he worked as a scientist at the Institute for Biological Chemistry, Washington State University in Pullman. Since 1997 he is a director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, where he heads the department of biochemistry. He was appointed honorary professor at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 1999.

#1825

Evelyn M. Witkin

Evelyn M. Witkin

#23360

Overall Influence

1921 - 2023 (102 years)

Evelyn M. Witkin was an American bacterial geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory , SUNY Downstate Medical Center , and Rutgers University . Witkin was considered innovative and inspirational as a scientist, teacher and mentor.

#1826

Lionel Naccache

#28115

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Lionel Naccache is a French neurologist and specialist in cognitive neuroscience.

#1827

Pamela C. Rasmussen

Pamela C. Rasmussen

#32233

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Pamela Cecile Rasmussen is an American ornithologist and expert on Asian birds. She was formerly a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and is based at the Michigan State University. She is associated with other major centers of research in the United States and the United Kingdom.

#1828

Charles Godfray

#47187

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sir Hugh Charles Jonathan Godfray CBE FRS is a British zoologist. He is Professor of Population Biology at Balliol College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Martin School and Director Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food.

#1829

Lionel Crawford

#32244

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Dr Lionel Vivian Crawford is a British cancer expert and virologist. He was educated at Rendcomb College between 1941 and 1950 before being called up for National Service. After demobilization in 1952 he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge with a State Scholarship, graduating with a first class degree in Botany, Zoology, Organic Chemistry and Biology in 1955. after graduate work at the Cambridge Department of Chemical Microbiology he completed his PhD in 1958 in biochemistry. Until 1960 he worked as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, at which point he became a researcher at the Glasgow Institute of Virology.

#1830

Mitsuaki Yoshida

#24912

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Mitsuaki Yoshida was a Japanese virologist known for identifying the molecular structure of Human T-lymphotropic virus 1 responsible for Adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma. Life Yoshida was born in Toyama, Japan and received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of Tokyo. After his postdoctoral fellowship at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, he worked to uncover the relationship between oncovirus and carcinogenesis at the Cancer Institute, Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research from 1975 to 1989. He was appointed as Professor at the Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo in 1989, where he served as Dean from 1996 to 1998.

#1831

Michael Hassell

#49034

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Patrick Hassell is a British biologist, noted for his work in population ecology, especially in insects. He is a professor at Imperial College London. Hassell was born in Tel Aviv, the son of Albert and Ruth Hassell and was educated at Whitgift School, Croydon. He studied zoology at the University of Cambridge and received his Ph.D degree from the University of Oxford in 1967. He later worked as a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and at Oxford. Hassell joined Imperial College London in 1970 as a lecturer. He became a reader in 1975 and was named Professor of Insect Ecology in 1979.

#1832

Brian Heap

#34897

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Sir Robert Brian Heap is a British biological scientist. He was educated at New Mills Grammar School in the Peak District, Derbyshire, and the University of Nottingham . He has an MA and a ScD from the University of Cambridge and Honorary DScs from Nottingham , York and St Andrews .

#1833

Gina Rippon

#23381

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gina Rippon is a British neurobiologist and feminist. She is a professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. Rippon has also sat on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychophysiology. In 2019, Rippon published her book, Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, which investigates the role of life experiences and biology in brain development.

#1834

Marshall Hatch

#40259

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Marshall Davidson Hatch AM was an Australian biochemist and plant physiologist. He was the chief research scientist at the CSIRO Division of Plant Industry in Canberra. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from the University of Göttingen and the University of Queensland. In Australia, in 1966, he elucidated, jointly with Charles Roger Slack, the C4 pathway for the fixation of carbon, which is also sometimes known as the Hatch-Slack pathway. He is now ...

#1835

Kenji Kosaka

#16507

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

was a Japanese psychiatrist, known for his pioneer research on Dementia with Lewy bodies , which he first described. Life and career Kosaka was born in Ise, Mie, and completed his M.D. in 1965 from Kanazawa University. He was appointed a professor of psychiatry at Yokohama City University School of Medicine in 1991, before becoming a director of Yokohama City University Medical Center in 1995. He was a director of Medical Care Court Clinic in Yokohama since 2011.

#1836

Melitta Schachner

#56354

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#1837

Michael A. Pfaller

#56356

Overall Influence

#1838

Diego Golombek

#27836

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Diego Golombek is an Argentine biologist, communicator and popularizer of science. He is currently professor at National University of Quilmes and researcher at CONICET. He is author of several books about biology and related topics, although he is mainly known due to his appearances on radio and television.

#1839

Charles S. Cockell

#39133

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Charles Cockell is a British astrobiologist who is professor of astrobiology in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh and co-director of the UK Centre for Astrobiology.

#1840

Steven McKnight

#40692

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Steven Lanier McKnight is a professor and former chair of the department of biochemistry at UT Southwestern. His research is in the area of transcriptional regulation. McKnight received his bachelor's degree from University of Texas in 1974 and his PhD from University of Virginia in 1977. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator from 1988 to 1992.

#1841

James A. Jensen

James A. Jensen

#24976

Overall Influence

1918 - 1998 (80 years)

James Alvin Jensen , was an American paleontologist. His extensive collecting program at Brigham Young University in the Utah-Colorado region which spanned 23 years was comparable in terms of the number of specimens collected to that of Barnum Brown during the early 20th century. He was given the name "Dinosaur Jim" during the media coverage of his activities. Perhaps his most significant contribution to paleontology was to replace the 19th-century web of external metal struts, straps and posts that had been used to mount dinosaurs with a system of supports which were placed inside of bones, ...

#1842

Gene E. Robinson

#51302

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Gene Ezia Robinson is an American entomologist, Director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and National Academy of Sciences member. He pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior and led the effort to sequence the honey bee genome. On February 10, 2009, his research was famously featured in an episode of The Colbert Report whose eponymous host referred to the honey Dr. Robinson sent him as "pharmaceutical-grade hive jive".

#1843

Kamal Ranadive

#35796

Overall Influence

1917 - 2001 (84 years)

Kamal Jayasing Ranadive was an Indian biomedical researcher known for her research on the links between cancers and viruses. She was a founding member of the Indian Women Scientists' Association . In the 1960s, she established India's first tissue culture research laboratory at the Indian Cancer Research Centre in Mumbai.

#1844

Friedrich Ruttner

#31364

Overall Influence

1914 - 1998 (84 years)

Friedrich Ruttner was an Austrian SA-member, NSDAP member, SS-physician, neurologist, zoologist and bee expert. He became internationally known for his advances in honey bee breeding, instrumental insemination, classification of various subspecies and as a co-founder of Apidologie.

#1845

Samuel H. Gruber

#37041

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Samuel H. Gruber was a shark biologist and founder of the American Elasmobranch Society. He was a professor at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science and the founder of the Bimini Biological Field Station Foundation.

#1846

Charles Scriver

#42145

Overall Influence

1930 - 2023 (93 years)

Charles Robert Scriver was a Canadian pediatrician and biochemical geneticist. His work focused on inborn errors of metabolism and led in establishing a Canada-wide newborn metabolic screening program.

#1847

George Poinar Jr.

#31405

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

George O. Poinar Jr. is an American entomologist and writer. He is known for popularizing the idea of extracting DNA from insects fossilized in amber, an idea which received widespread attention when adapted by Michael Crichton for the book and movie Jurassic Park.

#1848

Surajit Kumar De Datta

#22474

Overall Influence

Surajit Kumar De Datta is an Indian American agronomist who is best known for his high yield variety of rice IR-8 that contributed significantly to the Green Revolution across Asia. Over the course of 27 years, he worked at the International Rice Research Institute in Philippines helping Southeast Asia get self-sufficiency in rice production. His book on rice production, Principles and Practices of Rice Production, is considered an authoritative opus in the field of rice cultivation. He has also written two books namely, "Availability of Phosphorus and Utilization of Phosphate Fertilizers in S...

#1849

Shekhar C. Mande

Shekhar C. Mande

#23521

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Shekhar C. Mande is Structural and Computational Biologist. He was the Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research , India, and the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research , Ministry of Science and Technology. Prior to this, he was the Director of National Centre for Cell Science, Pune.

#1850

Jan Vilček

#39122

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Jan T. Vilček is a Slovak-American biomedical scientist, educator, inventor and philanthropist. He is a professor in the department of microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine, and chairman and CEO of The Vilcek Foundation. Vilček received his M.D. degree from Comenius University Medical School in Bratislava in 1957; and his Ph.D. in Virology from the Institute of Virology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, in 1962.

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