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.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1851

Michael Worobey

#38205

Overall Influence

Michael Worobey is a Canadian evolutionary biologist, and a professor and department head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. He has done important work in the study of the evolution of HIV-1, which demonstrated the extensive genetic diversity of the virus by 1960, fully refuting the contaminated polio vaccine theory as the origin of the AIDS pandemic.

#1852

David Amaral

#36902

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

David Gil Amaral is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, United States, and since 1998 has been the research director at the M.I.N.D. Institute, an affiliate of UC Davis, engaged in interdisciplinary research into the causes and treatment of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders. Amaral joined the UC Davis faculty as a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and the Center for Neuroscience and as an investigator at the California Regional Primate Research Center in 1991. Since 1995, he has been a professor of psychiatry in the UC Davis School of Medic...

#1853

Jeffrey V. Ravetch

#49692

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jeffrey Victor Ravetch is a professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Immunology at The Rockefeller University. Background and training Ravetch earned his B.S. degree at Yale University in 1973 in molecular biophysics and biochemistry working with Donald Crothers on the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of synthetic oligoribonucleotides. He received a Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University in 1978 in bacterial genetics working in the laboratory of Norton Zinder and Peter Model in the Laboratory of Genetics at Rockefeller and an M.D. from Cornell University Medical School in 1979.

#1854

Jan Hoeijmakers

Jan Hoeijmakers

#22892

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jan Hendrik Jozef Hoeijmakers is a Dutch molecular biologist, biochemist, and molecular geneticist. Education and career Hoeijmakers studied biology from 1969 at the Radboud University Nijmegen with receiving his MSc degree in molecular biology in 1975 . At the University of Amsterdam he performed his doctoral research from 1975 to 1979 and then was a lecturer at the department of microbiology from 1979 to 1981. He obtained a PhD in molecular medicine in 1981 from the University of Amsterdam under Piet Borst with dissertation Trypanosomes: Kinetoplast DNA and Antigenic Variation. At Erasmus ...

#1855

Andrew H. J. Wang

#52240

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Andrew Wang or Wang Hui-jun , usually cited as Andrew H. J. Wang, is a Taiwanese biochemist. Biography Wang was raised in Chiayi, and earned a bachelor's and master's degree from National Taiwan University in 1967 and 1970, respectively. He then pursued a doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1974 and 1988, when he returned to UIUC as a faculty member. Wang returned to Taiwan in 2000 for a position at Academia Sinica. Wang is noted for his research into PTPN3-protein kinase 12 complex and ha...

#1856

Robert I. Levy

#56829

Overall Influence

#1857

William B. Hurlbut

#14728

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

William B. Hurlbut is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University Medical Center. Born in 1945 in St. Helena, California, he grew up in Bronxville, New York. After completing his undergraduate studies at Stanford University in 1968, Hurlbut went on to pursue medical training and earned his medical degree in 1974, also from Stanford University. Following his medical education, he embarked on postdoctoral studies focused on theology and medical ethics.

#1858

Janis Antonovics

#47559

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Janis Antonovics FRS is an American biologist, and Lewis and Clark Professor of Biology, at University of Virginia. Life He was educated at Gravesend Grammar School , graduating from Clare College, Cambridge with a B.A. in 1963, and from University of Wales with a Ph.D. in 1966. He lectured at Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin.

#1859

Akio Mori

#21194

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

is a Japanese physiologist, sports scientist and writer. He is also the founder and the former head of the Japanese learned society . Mori was originally known for his physiology researches, but began to write books about human neuroscience, coining the term "game brain" in his 2002 book . He claimed that the brains of people who played video games were physically damaged. Game Nō no Kyōfu received much attention from critics such as Tamaki Saitō.

#1860

Rolf Sattler

#24829

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Rolf Sattler FLS FRSC is a Canadian plant morphologist, biologist, philosopher, and educator. He is considered one of the most significant contributors to the field of plant morphology and "one of the foremost plant morphologists in the world." His contributions are not only empirical but involved also a revision of the most fundamental concepts, theories, and philosophical assumptions. He published the award-winning Organogenesis of Flowers and nearly a hundred scientific papers, mainly on plant morphology. As well he has contributed to many national and international symposia and also org...

#1861

Vanessa Ruta

#30009

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Vanessa Julia Ruta is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the structure and function of chemosensory circuits underlying innate and learned behaviors in the fly Drosophila melanogaster. She is the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University and, as of 2021, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

#1862

Steven M. Goodman

#23409

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Steven Michael Goodman is an American conservation biologist, and field biologist on staff in the Department of Zoology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Life He graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy High School in 1975. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in 1984, from the University of Hamburg with a Ph.D. in 2000, and from the Université Paris-Sud XI, with an H.D.R. in 2005. In the early 1990s, with the World Wildlife Fund, he created the Ecological Training Program .

#1863

Joseph Bruno Slowinski

#39713

Overall Influence

1962 - 2001 (39 years)

Joseph Bruno Slowinski was an American herpetologist who worked extensively with elapid snakes. Research and career Slowinski was born on November 15, 1962, in New York City, New York. He attained his bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Kansas in 1984 and went on to receive his Ph.D. at the University of Miami in 1991, studying under herpetologist Jay M. Savage. He performed postdoctoral work at the National Museum of Natural History and Louisiana State University, eventually taking a position as a professor of biology at Southeastern Louisiana University.

#1864

Richard A. Lutz

Richard A. Lutz

#35297

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Richard Arthur Lutz is an American marine biologist and deep-sea oceanographer. He is known for deep-sea research using the Alvin submersible, and is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on the ecology of deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

#1865

Adolf Seilacher

Adolf Seilacher

#33709

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Adolf "Dolf" Seilacher was a German palaeontologist who worked in evolutionary and ecological palaeobiology for over 60 years. He is best known for his contributions to the study of trace fossils; constructional morphology and structuralism; biostratinomy, Lagerstätten and the Ediacaran biota.

#1866

Bob Waterston

#43761

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Robert Hugh "Bob" Waterston, is an American biologist. He is best known for his work on the Human Genome Project, for which he was a pioneer along with John Sulston. Education Waterston attended Princeton as an undergraduate where he majored in engineering; he wrote his senior dissertation on the plays of Eugene O'Neill. While on a visit to Germany he took courses in biology – in German – and returned to take up a place at the school of medicine of the University of Chicago. In 1972, he acquired both MD and PhD degrees, with his thesis focusing on immunology.

#1867

David Mark Richardson

#50035

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

David Mark Richardson is a South African ecologist, particularly known for his work on invasive species, especially invasive trees and shrubs. Biography Richardson was born in Pretoria. He received his BSc degree in Forestry from Stellenbosch University in 1981 and his PhD in Botany from the University of Cape Town in 1989. He worked as Associate Professor of Botany and deputy director of the Institute for Plant Conservation at the University of Cape Town from 1992 to 2004. He joined the Department of Botany and Zoology at Stellenbosch University as Professor of Ecology and served as Deputy-Director at the Centre for Invasion Biology between 2004 and 2012.

#1868

Yuan Chang

#27609

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Yuan Chang is a Taiwanese-American virologist and pathologist who co-discovered together with her husband, Patrick S. Moore, the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus and Merkel cell polyomavirus, two of the seven known human oncoviruses.

#1869

Edward Marcotte

#47530

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Edward Marcotte is a professor of biochemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, working in genetics, proteomics, and bioinformatics. Marcotte is an example of a computational biologist who also relies on experiments to validate bioinformatics-based predictions.

#1870

Ian Wilson

#37752

Overall Influence

Ian Andrew Wilson is the Hansen Professor of Structural Biology and chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, United States.

#1871

Edward Slater

#49650

Overall Influence

1917 - 2016 (99 years)

Edward Charles Slater , also known as Bill Slater, was an Australian biochemist who spent most of his career at the University of Amsterdam. Early life and education Slater was raised in Australia. He received a training in biochemistry at the Ormond College of the University of Melbourne. In 1946, he moved to Cambridge, where he earned his PhD under the supervision of David Keilin.

#1872

Ivan Roitt

#41568

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Ivan Maurice Roitt is a British scientist. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Balliol College, Oxford University. He was Head of the Department of Immunology at University College London from 1967 to 1992, and is currently Honorary Director of the Centre for Investigative & Diagnostic Oncology at Middlesex University, London, and is related to multi-award winning radio producer Colin Roitt.

#1873

Arthur Shapiro

#34176

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Arthur M. Shapiro is a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis. He graduated with an AB in biology from University of Pennsylvania and completed his PhD in Entomology at Cornell in 1970.

#1874

Elisabeth Bik

#27939

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant. Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications, and identifying over 4,000 potential cases of improper research conduct, including 400 research papers published by authors in China from a research paper mill company. Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest, a blog with daily updates on microbiome research, and the Science Integrity Digest blog.

#1875

V. C. Wynne-Edwards

V. C. Wynne-Edwards

#36820

Overall Influence

1906 - 1997 (91 years)

Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards, CBE, FRS, FRSE was an English zoologist. He was best known for his advocacy of group selection, the theory that natural selection acts at the level of the group. Life He was born in Leeds on 4 July 1906 the son of Rev Canon John Rosindale Wynne-Edwards and his wife, Lilian Agnes Streatfield. He attended Rugby School then studied Zoology at Oxford University graduating MA. In 1929 he took a post at McGill University in Canada, lecturing in zoology. This was interrupted by the Second World War during which he served in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve. After the war A...

#1876

Axel Kahn

#7668

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Axel Kahn was a French scientist and geneticist. He was the brother of the journalist Jean-François Kahn and the chemist Olivier Kahn. He was a member of the French National Consultative Ethics Committee from 1992 to 2004 and worked in gene therapy. He first entered the INSERM with a specialization in biochemistry. He was named in 2002 as a counsellor for biosciences and biotechnologies matters by the European Commission. Head of French laboratories specialized in biomedical sciences between years 1984 and 2007, he was elected President of the Paris Descartes University in December 2007, as t...

#1877

Richard Dixon

#54104

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Richard A. Dixon is distinguished research professor at the University of North Texas, a faculty fellow of the Hagler Institute of Advanced Study and Timothy C. Hall-Heep distinguished faculty chair at Texas A&M University.

#1878

Michael Stratton

#33532

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Sir Michael Rudolf Stratton, is a British clinical scientist and the third director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He currently heads the Cancer Genome Project and is a leader of the International Cancer Genome Consortium.

#1879

George F. Gao

#53444

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Gao Fu , also known as George Fu Gao, is a Chinese virologist and immunologist. He served as Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention from August 2017 to July 2022 and has been Dean of the Savaid Medical School of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2015.

#1880

Sylvie Cloutier

#39694

Overall Influence

Sylvie Cloutier is a Canadian scientist. She is a specialist in molecular genetics at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's Ottawa Research and Development Centre and an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa. She has co-led two Genome Canada Large Scale Applied Research projects of $11M each and has been involved in over 110 published research papers and made contributions to many books.

#1881

Ad Konings

#44102

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Adrianus Franciscus Johannes Marinus Maria "Ad" Konings is an ichthyologist originally trained in medicine and biology. Konings is best known for his research on African rift lake cichlids. After studies in Amsterdam, he has spent most of his life in Rotterdam.

#1882

Therese Ann Markow

#45754

Overall Influence

Therese Ann Markow is the Amylin Chair in Life Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Her research involves the use of genetics and ecology to study the insects of the Sonoran Desert. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2001 and the Genetics Society of America George Beadle Award in 2012. Her research received widespread attention for its alleged misuse of Native American genetic data.

#1883

Peter Ward

#15489

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Peter Douglas Ward is an American paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Sprigg Institute of Geobiology at the University of Adelaide. He has written numerous popular science works for a general audience and is also an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum. In 2000, along with his co-author Donald E. Brownlee, he co-originated the term Rare Earth and developed the Medea hypothesis alleging that multicellular life is ultimately self-destructive.

#1884

Robin Weiss

#41794

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Robert Anthony "Robin" Weiss is a British molecular biologist, Professor of Viral Oncology at University College London and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Research His research has focussed on retroviruses, initially as a means of understanding T-cell leukemia and other cancers, which may be caused by retroviruses. A break-through discovery in 1971 was that the retroviral genome in chickens follows the rules of Mendelian inheritance. Later his work moved on to HIV, also a retrovirus, and made several new important discoveries, most notably identifying CD4 on lymphocytes as the...

#1885

Harold C. Neu

#57533

Overall Influence

#1886

Edward Thomas Bullmore

#57586

Overall Influence

#1887

Gary Paul Nabhan

#21801

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Gary Paul Nabhan is an agricultural ecologist, Ethnobotanist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and author whose work has focused primarily on the plants and cultures of the desert Southwest. He is considered a pioneer in the local food movement and the heirloom seed saving movement.

#1888

Mae-Wan Ho

#26399

Overall Influence

1941 - 2016 (75 years)

Mae-Wan Ho was a geneticist known for her critical views on genetic engineering and evolution. She authored or co-authored a number of publications, including 10 books, such as The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms , Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? , Living with the Fluid Genome and Living Rainbow H2O .

#1889

David Leslie Hawksworth

#48661

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

David Leslie Hawksworth is a British mycologist and lichenologist currently with a professorship in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Madrid, Spain and also a Scientific Associate of The Natural History Museum in London. In 2002, he was honoured with an Acharius Medal by the International Association for Lichenology. He married Patricia Wiltshire, a leading forensic ecologist and palynologist in 2009. , he is the Editor-in-Chief of the journals IMA Fungus and Biodiversity and Conservation.

#1890

Maynard Olson

#39887

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Maynard Victor Olson is an American chemist and molecular biologist. As a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, be became a specialist in the genetics of cystic fibrosis, and one of the founders of the Human Genome Project. During his years at Washington University in St. Louis, he also led efforts to develop yeast artificial chromosomes that allowed for the study of large portions of the human genome.

#1891

Gordon M. Keller

#54436

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Gordon M. Keller is a Canadian scientist recognized for his research on applying developmental biology findings to in vitro pluripotent stem cell differentiation. He is currently a Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute, a Professor at the University of Toronto and the director of the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine.

#1892

Héctor Croxatto

Héctor Croxatto

#36747

Overall Influence

1908 - 2010 (102 years)

Héctor Croxatto Rezzio was a Chilean physiologist. He won the Chilean National Prize for Sciences in 1979. He was a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Raised in Temuco, he studied medicine at the University of Chile in Santiago, where he received his medical degree in 1930. Physiology, biology and biochemistry were the bulk of his research interests. For two decades he taught physiology at the Instituto de Educación Física y Técnica of Casa de Bello. Later, he was dean of the medical faculty of the University of Chile. In 1969 he joined the Academy of Science of Chile. Seven years later he became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican.

#1893

David S. Wishart

#43071

Overall Influence

David S. Wishart is a Canadian researcher and a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. Wishart also holds cross appointments in the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. Additionally, Wishart holds a joint appointment in metabolomics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. Wishart is well known for his pioneering contributions to the fields of protein NMR spectroscopy, bioinformatics, cheminformatics and metabolomics.

#1894

Brian Charlesworth

#57750

Overall Influence

#1895

Mircea Steriade

#48660

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Mircea Steriade , MD, DSc, was a prominent researcher in systems neuroscience. He was born in Bucharest, Romania, and studied medicine at University of Bucharest. He emigrated to Canada in 1968, where he became a professor of physiology at Université Laval in Quebec, a position he held for the rest of his life.

#1896

Earl R. Stadtman

#57760

Overall Influence

#1897

Sheldon Schuster

Sheldon Schuster

#36138

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sheldon M. Schuster is an American biochemist, cancer researcher and academic. He is the current president of Keck Graduate Institute as of 2003. He has previously served as a professor at University of Nebraska–Lincoln and University of Florida. While at Florida, he was the director of research and the university's biotechnology program.

#1898

Donald S. Fredrickson

#57787

Overall Influence

#1899

Carlos Cordon-Cardo

#35308

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Carlos Cordon-Cardo is a Spanish-born American physician and scientist known for his research in experimental pathology and molecular oncology. He holds the "Irene Heinz Given and John LaPorte Given" Chair in Pathology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

#1900

Pål Nyrén

#34705

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Pål Nyrén is a biochemistry professor at the Royal Institute of Technology , Stockholm. He is most famous for developing the pyrosequencing method for DNA sequencing. Career 1999 Professor in Biochemistry, KTH, Stockholm1997 Founder of the company Biotage AB 1988 Associate professor Biochemistry, University of Stockholm1985-86 Postdoc at LMB, MRC, Cambridge, G.B. with prof John Walker1985 PhD Biochemistry, University of Stockholm 1981 MSc Chemical Engineering, KTH, Stockholm

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions