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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.

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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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#18001

Ernest Borek

1911 - 1986 (75 years)

Ernest Borek was a Hungarian-American microbiologist, university professor, cancer researcher, and author. He was a professor at City University of New York and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons . He was chairman of the Colorado Regional Cancer Center's Support Review Committee of the National Cancer Institute.

#18002

William Skinner Cooper

1884 - 1978 (94 years)

William Skinner Cooper was an American ecologist. Cooper received his B.S. in 1906 from Alma College in Michigan. In 1909, he entered graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he studied with Henry Chandler Cowles, and completed his Ph.D. in 1911. His first major publication, "The Climax Forest of Isle Royale, Lake Superior, and Its Development" appeared in 1913.

#18003

Robert L. Usinger

1912 - 1968 (56 years)

Robert Leslie Usinger was an American entomologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Davis. A fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he served as president of the Entomological Society of America in 1965–1966. Prior to his appointment as their president, he was their fellow, starting from 1951. He produced over 250 publications, including several popular books, and was known as an expert on the Hemiptera, the "true bugs".

#18004

G. P. Wells

1901 - 1985 (84 years)

George Philip Wells FRS was a British zoologist and author. A son of the author H. G. Wells, he co-authored, with his father and Julian Huxley, The Science of Life. A pupil at Oundle School, he was in the first class to learn Russian as a modern language in a British school. He accompanied his father to Soviet Russia in 1920, acting as his Russian translator and exchanging ideas with Russian zoology students. He won an entrance Exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became Senior Scholar in his first year of residence.

#18005

Willi Hennig

1913 - 1976 (63 years)

Emil Hans Willi Hennig was a German biologist and zoologist who is considered the founder of phylogenetic systematics, otherwise known as cladistics. In 1945 as a prisoner of war, Hennig began work on his theory of cladistics, which he published in German in 1950, with a substantially revised English translation published in 1966. With his works on evolution and systematics he revolutionised the view of the natural order of beings. As a taxonomist, he specialised in dipterans .

#18006

Tracy I. Storer

Tracy I. Storer

1889 - 1973 (84 years)

Tracy Irwin Storer was an American zoologist known for his contributions to the wildlife of California and the ecology of the Sierra Nevada. He was a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis for over 30 years. He served as president of several biological societies, including the Cooper Ornithological Club , Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, the Society of Mammalogists, and the Wildlife Society, and was a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences which in 1968 awarded him the Fellow's Medal, the academy's highest honor.

#18007

Roger Arliner Young

Roger Arliner Young

1889 - 1964 (75 years)

Roger Arliner Young was an American scientist of zoology, biology, and marine biology. She was the first African American woman to receive a doctorate degree in zoology. Early years Born in Clifton Forge, Virginia in 1899, Young soon moved with her family to Burgettstown, Pennsylvania where she graduated from Burgettstown High School. Her father labored as a coal miner, and her mother initially worked as a housekeeper before disability left her unable to work. The family was poor and most of the time resources were expended in the care of her disabled mother.

#18008

Beatrice M. Sweeney

1914 - 1989 (75 years)

Eleanor Beatrice Marcy "Beazy" Sweeney was an American plant physiologist and a pioneering investigator into circadian rhythms. At the time of her death she was professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she had worked since 1961.

#18009

Ernest Kennaway

Ernest Kennaway

1881 - 1958 (77 years)

Sir Ernest Laurence Kennaway FRS was a British pathologist and Royal Medal winner. He first became interested in natural life when, due to a childhood illness, he was encouraged to spend time outdoors. He was trained at University College London, and in 1898 was accepted into New College, Oxford on an open scholarship to study natural sciences. He graduated with a B.A. in 1903, and after three years at Middlesex Hospital he completed a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery. After graduating he worked for The Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine and UCL before returning to Oxford, this time to Brasenose College on a Hulme scholarship in 1909.

#18010

Philip Loring

Philip Allen Loring is a human ecologist and author. Loring is currently the Arrell Chair in Food, Policy, and Society at the Arrell Food Institute at University of Guelph. He is known for his work on Arctic food security, natural resource conflict, and regenerative food systems. Loring authored Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology , and is the host of multiple academic podcasts.

#18011

Charles Paul Alexander

1889 - 1981 (92 years)

Charles Paul Alexander was an American entomologist who specialized in the craneflies, Tipulidae. Charles Paul Alexander was the son of Emil Alexander and Jane Alexander . Emil immigrated to the United States in 1873 and changed his surname from Schlandensky to Alexander. Charles entered Cornell University in 1909, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1913 and a Ph.D. in 1918. Between 1917 and 1919, he was entomologist at the University of Kansas, then from 1919 to 1922, at the University of Illinois.

#18012

E. Morton Jellinek

1890 - 1963 (73 years)

Elvin Morton "Bunky" Jellinek , E. Morton Jellinek, or most often, E. M. Jellinek, was a biostatistician, physiologist, and an alcoholism researcher, fluent in nine languages and able to communicate in four others.

#18013

Sabra Klein

Sabra Klein is an American microbiologist who is a Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research considers how sex and gender impact the immune system. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Klein investigated why men and women have different COVID-19 outcomes.

#18014

Sherburne F. Cook

1896 - 1974 (78 years)

Sherburne Friend Cook was an American physiologist and demographist, who served as professor and chairman of the department of physiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was notable as a pioneer in population studies of the native peoples of North America and Mesoamerica and in field methods and quantitative analysis in archaeology.

#18015

Nansie S. Sharpless

1932 - 1987 (55 years)

Nansie S. Sharpless was an American biochemist. She was an associate professor of psychiatry and neurology and Chief of the Clinical Neuropsychopharmacology Laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Deaf from the age of fourteen, Sharpless encouraged deaf people to consider careers in scientific research. She also served as the president of the Foundation for Science and the Handicapped.

#18016

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

1879 - 1967 (88 years)

Ralph Vary Chamberlin was an American biologist, ethnographer, and historian from Salt Lake City, Utah. He was a faculty member of the University of Utah for over 25 years, where he helped establish the School of Medicine and served as its first dean, and later became head of the zoology department. He also taught at Brigham Young University and the University of Pennsylvania, and worked for over a decade at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he described species from around the world.

#18017

Edmund Jacobson

1888 - 1983 (95 years)

Edmund Jacobson was an American physician in internal medicine and psychiatry and a physiologist. He was the creator of Progressive Muscle Relaxation and of Biofeedback. Biography He was born on April 22, 1888, Chicago to Fannie and Morris Jacobson. His father was a realtor in Chicago, who was born in Strasbourg, and his wife Fannie was born in Iowa.

#18018

Arnold Kriegstein

Arnold Richard Kriegstein is a neurologist and neuroscientist who is the John Bowes Distinguished Professor in Stem Cell and Tissue Biology at the University of California, San Francisco where he serves as director of the UCSF Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research. His main research interests include neural stem cell and brain development. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

#18019

Alexander John Haddow

1912 - 1978 (66 years)

Alexander John Haddow, CMG FRS FRES . was a Scottish entomologist recognised for his work at the Uganda Virus Research Institute, including the discovery of the Zika virus, and research into the insect vectors of the yellow fever virus. Other notable work included relating the incidence of Burkitt's lymphoma to climatic conditions and the discovery of several previously unknown viruses in east Africa, particularly arboviruses.

#18020

William C. Steere

William C. Steere

1907 - 1989 (82 years)

William Campbell Steere was an American botanist known as an expert on bryophytes, especially arctic and tropical American species. Early life Steere was born November 4, 1907, in Muskegon, Michigan to a family of Irish Quakers. His paternal grandfather was Joseph Beal Steere. Steere attended the University of Michigan, and earned his B.S. in botany with "high distinction". He briefly attended the University of Pennsylvania where he studied cytology under William Randolph Taylor, while also working as an instructor at Temple University. Steere was persuaded by Harley H. Bartlett to return to the University of Michigan as an instructor.

#18021

Agnes Fogo

Agnes B. Fogo is a professor of renal pathology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Biography Fogo graduated from the University of Oslo, Norway, and the University of Tennessee, USA. She completed her M.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine before going on to do residency and a fellowship in renal pathology.

#18022

Eugene Raymond Hall

1902 - 1986 (84 years)

Eugene Raymond Hall was an American mammalogist. Biology Hall graduated from the University of Kansas with A.B. in 1924 and from the University of California, Berkeley with M.A. in 1925 and Ph.D. in 1928. His doctoral dissertation, under the direction of Joseph Grinnell, was a taxonomic revision of the American weasels. At U.C. Berkeley, Hall was a research assistant from 1926 to 1927, curator of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology from 1927 to 1944, an assistant professor of vertebrate zoology from 1930 to 1937, and an associate professor from 1937 to 1944. At the University of Kansas he was a...

#18023

Oskar Kuhn

1908 - 1990 (82 years)

Oskar Kuhn was a German palaeontologist. Life and career Kuhn was educated in Dinkelsbühl and Bamberg and then studied natural science, specialising in geology and paleontology, at the University of Munich, from which he received his D. Phil. in 1932.

#18024

George Hill Mathewson Lawrence

1910 - 1978 (68 years)

George Hill Mathewson Lawrence was an American botanist, writer and professor of botany who helped establish the 'Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium', the Hunt Botanical Library and the Huntia journal. He was also an avid book collector, including books on the history of Rhode Island, historic books and botanical art.

#18025

Walter H. Burkholder

1891 - 1983 (92 years)

Walter Hagemeyer Burkholder was an American plant pathologist who helped establish the role of bacteria as plant pathogens. He was awarded a Ph.D. by Cornell University in 1917 and subsequently appointed as professor of plant pathology.

#18026

Irene Baker

1918 - 1989 (71 years)

Irene Baker was an American botanist who collaborated with her husband Herbert G. Baker to research pollination biology, the composition of nectar and study its ecological, evolutionary and taxonomic qualities.

#18027

John Aber

1900 - Present (126 years)

John D. Aber is University Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources & the Environment at the University of New Hampshire, and was also for many years affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at UNH. His fields of study included Ecosystem Analysis and Modeling, Global Change, Acid Rain, Nitrogen Deposition and Sustainable Agriculture.

#18028

Arne Tiselius

1902 - 1971 (69 years)

Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius was a Swedish biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1948 "for his research on electrophoresis and adsorption analysis, especially for his discoveries concerning the complex nature of the serum proteins."

#18029

Kono Yasui

1880 - 1971 (91 years)

Kono Yasui was a Japanese biologist and cytologist. In 1927, she became the first Japanese woman to receive a doctoral degree in science. She received a Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon and was awarded as an Order of the Precious Crown Third Class for her academic accomplishments and leadership in women’s education in Japan.

#18030

William Macnae

1914 - 1975 (61 years)

William Macnae, 1914-1975, was a South African zoologist and malacologist. He was a Scottish born-and-educated marine ecologist and moved to South Africa in 1948. Career Macnae wrote the Crustacea section of the report entitled "Natural History of Canna and Sanday, Inner Hebrides: a report upon the Glasgow University Canna Expeditions, 1936 and 1937" published by the University of Glasgow in 1939 detailing the two visits by members of Glasgow University to Canna, Scotland, in June and July 1936 and 1937. In this report is the only British record of Chydorus gibbus , belonging to the sub-order ...

#18031

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.

#18032

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.

#18033

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.

#18034

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.

#18035

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.

#18036

Carl H. Lindroth

1905 - 1979 (74 years)

Carl Hildebrand Lindroth was a Swedish entomologist and a professor at Lund University. He was a specialist in carabidology , with a special interest in biogeography. He was a strong proponent of the glacial refugium hypothesis and made use of the framework to explain the distribution patterns of Scandinavian beetles.

#18037

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.

#18038

Robert Corey

1897 - 1971 (74 years)

Robert Brainard Corey was an American biochemist, mostly known for his role in discovery of the α-helix and the β-sheet with Linus Pauling. Also working with Pauling was Herman Branson. Their discoveries were remarkably correct, with even the bond lengths being accurate until about 40 years later. The α-helix and β-sheet are two structures that are now known to form the backbones of many proteins.

#18039

Edmund Ware Sinnott

Edmund Ware Sinnott

1888 - 1968 (80 years)

Edmund Ware Sinnott was an American botanist and educator. Sinnott is best known for his work in plant morphology. Career Sinnott received his Bachelor of Arts , Master of Arts , and Doctor of Philosophy , all from Harvard University. During his freshman year of college, he lived in Stoughton Hall. Sinnott studied in Australia with Arthur Johnson Eames from 1910 to 1911. Upon graduation, he became an instructor at Harvard, and worked with I. W. Bailey, the anatomist. From 1915 to 1928, he was at the Connecticut Agricultural College at Storrs, becoming Professor of Botany and Genetics. From 19...

#18040

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.

#18041

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.

#18042

Michael J. D. White

1910 - 1983 (73 years)

Michael James Denham White FRS was an Australian zoologist and cytologist. White grew up in Tuscany, Italy, where he was home-schooled, before beginning undergraduate studies at University College London from 1927.

#18043

L. C. Dunn

1893 - 1974 (81 years)

Leslie Clarence Dunn was a developmental geneticist at Columbia University. His early work with the mouse T-locus and established ideas of gene interaction, fertility factors, and allelic distribution. Later work with other model organisms continued to contribute to developmental genetics. Dunn was also an activist, helping fellow scientists seek asylum during World War II, and a critic of eugenics movements.

#18044

Harold F. Blum

1899 - 1980 (81 years)

Harold Francis Blum was a physiologist who explored the interaction of light and chemicals on cells, especially sunlight-induced skin cancer. Early life and education Harold Blum was born on February 12, 1899, in Escondido, California. For a year during the First World War, he served with the American Expeditionary Forces Signal Corps in France. Blum graduated in 1922 from the University of California, Berkeley, with an A.B. in zoology with honors. He attended Harvard Medical School from 1923 to 1924, then returned to Berkeley for a Ph.D. in physiology and graduated in 1927. During his PhD studies Blum worked for the San Francisco Bay Marine Piling Committee.

#18045

Mary Shaw Shorb

1907 - 1990 (83 years)

Mary Shaw Shorb , a research scientist, was best known for the development of a bacteriological assay procedure for the chemical compound now known as Vitamin B12. Early years Mary Shaw was born on January 7, 1907, in Wahpeton, North Dakota, about forty miles south of Fargo. Her parents were Mary McKean and Ernest Shaw. The family moved to Caldwell, Idaho when Mary was three years old. She developed an early interest in biology through a neighbor and family friend, Dr. William Judson Boone. Founder and first President of the College of Idaho, Dr. Boone was a well-known botanist, and taught biology at the College.

#18046

Georg Haas

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Georg Haas was an Austrian-born Israeli herpetologist, malacologist and paleontologist, one of the founders of zoological research in Israel. Haas studied zoology in the University of Vienna. In 1932 he joined the Hebrew University staff and during the next four decades influenced several generations of young Israeli scientists.

#18047

Yaichirō Okada

1892 - 1976 (84 years)

was a Japanese zoologist. He was born in Ishikawa Prefecture. Okada studied at the Imperial Fisheries Institute . He was a professor at Tokyo Higher Normal School , and after World War II he taught at Mie University from 1950, where he was dean of Fisheries. After retirement he served as a professor at Tokai University.

#18048

Trevor Ian Shaw

1928 - 1972 (44 years)

Trevor Ian Shaw was an English experimental biologist who pioneered studies in physiology and biochemistry contributing to the understanding of transport across cell membranes against concentration gradients through active metabolism and the exchange of sodium and potassium ions. He also examined the mechanism by which the seaweed Laminaria digitata accumulated iodine and was known for his innovative experimental techniques.

#18049

Jean Brachet

1909 - 1988 (79 years)

Jean Louis Auguste Brachet was a Belgian biochemist who made a key contribution in understanding the role of RNA. Life Brachet was born in Etterbeek near Brussels in Belgium, the son of Albert Brachet, an eminent embryologist.

#18050

Edward Smith Deevey Jr.

1914 - 1988 (74 years)

Edward Smith Deevey Jr. , born in Albany, New York, was a prominent American ecologist and paleolimnologist, and an early protégé of G. Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale University. He was a creative pioneer in several areas, including quantitative palynology, cycling of natural isotopes, biogeochemistry, population dynamics, systematics and ecology of freshwater zooplankton, and he promoted the use of life tables in ecology.

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