The Most Influential People Across History
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).
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#18551
Clive McCay
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Clive Maine McCay was an American biochemist, nutritionist and gerontologist. Biography McCay was professor of animal husbandry at Cornell University from 1927 to 1963. His main interest was the influence of nutrition on aging. He is best known for his work in proving that caloric restriction increases the life span of rats, which is seen as seminal in triggering further research and experiments in the field of nutrition and longevity. Scientists are still trying to understand the connection between caloric restriction and longevity.
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Hideyo Noguchi
1876 - 1928 (52 years)
Hideyo Noguchi, also known as Seisaku Noguchi, was a prominent Japanese bacteriologist who in 1911 discovered the agent of syphilis as the cause of progressive paralytic disease. Early life Noguchi Hideyo, whose childhood name was Seisaku Noguchi, was born to a family of farmers for generations in Inawashiro, Fukushima prefecture in 1876. When he was one and a half years old, he fell into a fireplace and suffered a burn injury on his left hand. There was no doctor in the small village, but one of the men examined the boy. "The fingers of the left hand are mostly gone," he said, "and the left a...
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Richard Goldschmidt
1878 - 1958 (80 years)
Richard Benedict Goldschmidt was a German geneticist. He is considered the first to attempt to integrate genetics, development, and evolution. He pioneered understanding of reaction norms, genetic assimilation, dynamical genetics, sex determination, and heterochrony. Controversially, Goldschmidt advanced a model of macroevolution through macromutations popularly known as the "Hopeful Monster" hypothesis.
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Wendell Meredith Stanley
1904 - 1971 (67 years)
Wendell Meredith Stanley was an American biochemist, virologist and Nobel laureate. Biography Stanley was born in Ridgeville, Indiana, and earned a BSc in chemistry at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. He then studied at the University of Illinois, gaining an MS in science in 1927 followed by a PhD in chemistry two years later. His later accomplishments include writing the book "Chemistry: A Beautiful Thing" and being a Pulitzer Prize nominee.
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Nikolaas Tinbergen
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior.
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Simon Leather
Simon R Leather Hon.FRES was an entomologist in the UK, he was Professor of Entomology at Harper Adams University, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and an expert in aphids and applied entomology.
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Cornelius P. Rhoads
1898 - 1959 (61 years)
Cornelius Packard "Dusty" Rhoads was an American pathologist, oncologist, and hospital administrator who was involved in a racist scandal and subsequent whitewashing in the 1930s. Beginning in 1940, he served as director of Memorial Hospital for Cancer Research in New York, from 1945 was the first director of Sloan-Kettering Institute, and the first director of the combined Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center. For his contributions to cancer research, Rhoads was featured on the cover of the June 27, 1949 issue of Time magazine under the title "Cancer Fighter".
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Edward James Salisbury
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Sir Edward James Salisbury CBE FRS was an English botanist and ecologist. He was born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire and graduated in botany from University College London in 1905. In 1913, he obtained a D.Sc. with a thesis on fossil seeds and was appointed a senior lecturer at East London College. He returned to University College London as a senior lecturer, from 1924 as a reader in plant ecology and from 1929 as Quain Professor of botany.
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Albert Coons
1912 - 1978 (66 years)
Albert Hewett Coons was an American physician, pathologist, and immunologist. He was the first person to conceptualize and develop immunofluorescent techniques for labeling antibodies in the early 1940s.
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Philip Rodney White
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Philip Rodney White was an American botanist and agricultural scientist. Born on July 25, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois, as one of twins, he studied in France and Germany before receiving his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. During 1930 and 1931, he worked in Berlin at the laboratory of Gottlieb Haberlandt. Most of White's research was on using plant tissues to grow viruses. He died in Bombay, India, while on a lecture tour, on March 25, 1968.
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Robert Mertens
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
Robert Friedrich Wilhelm Mertens was a German herpetologist. Several taxa of reptiles are named after him. He postulated Mertensian mimicry. Mertens was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He moved to Germany in 1912, where he earned a doctorate in zoology from the University of Leipzig in 1915. During World War I he served in the German army.
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Zénon Bacq
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Zénon Bacq was a Belgian radiobiologist and inventor. He studied medicine at the Université Libre de Bruxelles , and became an MD in 1927. He studied at Harvard University , with a grant from the FNRS. He taught animal physiology, pathology, as well as pharmacology and radiobiology at the University of Liège .
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Norman Davidson
1911 - 1972 (61 years)
James Norman Davidson CBE PRSE FRS was a British biochemist, pioneer molecular biologist and textbook author. The Davidson Building at the University of Glasgow is named for him. Life He was the only child of Wilhelmina Ibberson Foote and James Davidson FRSE FSA a lawyer, Treasurer of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and originally from Aberdeenshire. He was born in Edinburgh on 5 March 1911 and lived in the family home of 30 Bruntsfield Gardens in the south of the city. He was educated locally, at George Watson's College, where he was dux.
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Tracy Sonneborn
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Tracy Morton Sonneborn was an American biologist. His life's study was ciliated protozoa of the group Paramecium. Education Sonneborn attended the Baltimore City Public Schools and graduated from the Baltimore City College in 1922. As an adolescent, Sonneborn was interested in the humanities and considered becoming a rabbi. After taking a biology course taught by E. A. Andrews, his interest in literature was eclipsed by his interest in science. He earned a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 1925 and a Ph.D in 1928. His graduate work, supervised by Herbert S. Jennings, focused on the flat...
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William Pearsall
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
William Harold Pearsall was a British botanist, Quain Professor of Botany at University College London 1944–1957. Awards and honours Pearsall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1940. His nomination reads:
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Abraham Wikler
1910 - 1981 (71 years)
Abraham Wikler was an American psychiatrist and neurologist who made important discoveries in drug addiction. He was one of the first to promote a view of addiction as conditioned behavior, and made the first observations of conditioned response in drug withdrawal symptoms. His research on conditioning and relapse played a pioneering role in the neuroscientific study of addiction.
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Calvin Bridges
1889 - 1938 (49 years)
Calvin Blackman Bridges was an American scientist known for his contributions to the field of genetics. Along with Alfred Sturtevant and H.J. Muller, Bridges was part of Thomas Hunt Morgan's famous "Fly Room" at Columbia University.
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Hiroshi Hara
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Hiroshi Hara was a Japanese botanist. Hara was born 1911 in Nagano. He studied at The University of Tokyo and became a professor there in 1957. Between 1968 and 1971 he was the director of the newly established University Museum of The University of Tokyo. Hara specialized in mosses, but described other plants as well.
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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.
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Samuel Bedson
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Sir Samuel Phillips Bedson, FRS was a British microbiologist who was professor emeritus of bacteriology at the University of London. Early life Bedson was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the son of Peter Phillip Bedson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Durham, and was educated at Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire. From there he went to Armstrong College, Newcastle upon Tyne, where he graduated BSc in 1907. In 1912, he was awarded MB BS degrees by the University of Durham. He then studied microbiology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
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Carl Niemann
1908 - 1964 (56 years)
Carl George Niemann was an American biochemist who worked extensively on the chemistry and structure of proteins, publishing over 260 research papers. He is known, with Max Bergmann, for proposing the Bergmann-Niemann hypothesis that proteins consist of 288 residue polypeptides or multiples thereof with periodic sequences of amino acids, and for contributing to the downfall of the cyclol model of protein structure.
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William Grey Walter
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
William Grey Walter was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician. Early life and education Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on 19 February 1910, the only child of Minerva Lucrezia Hardy , an American journalist and Karl Wilhelm Walter , a British journalist who was working on the Kansas City Star at the time. His parents had met and married in Italy, and during the First World War the family moved from to Britain. Walter's ancestry was German/British on his father's side, and American/British on his mother's side. He was brought to Engl...
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Alden H. Miller
1906 - 1965 (59 years)
Alden Holmes Miller was an American ornithologist and director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley for 25 years. He published over 250 papers on the biology, distribution, and taxonomy of birds, and served as president of the American Ornithologists' Union and the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature , and as editor of The Condor from 1939 until his death. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Henry A. Gleason
1882 - 1975 (93 years)
Henry Allan Gleason was an American ecologist, botanist, and taxonomist. He was known for his endorsement of the individualistic or open community concept of ecological succession, and his opposition to Frederic Clements's concept of the climax state of an ecosystem. His ideas were largely dismissed during his working life, leading him to move into plant taxonomy, but found favour late in the twentieth century.
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Chandler McCuskey Brooks
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Dr. Chandler McCuskey Brooks was an American physiologist notable for his research on the relationships between the central nervous and endocrine systems. He was also known for his studies of the electrophysiology of the heart. Brooks was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He also headed the physiology and pharmacology departments of the Long Island College of Medicine and a Guggenheim fellow .
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William S. Tillett
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
William Smith Tillett was an American internist and microbiologist. He is best known for the discovery of C-reactive protein and the streptokinase. He was also a professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine.
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Emil T. Kaiser
1938 - 1988 (50 years)
Emil Thomas Kaiser was a Hungarian-born American biochemist. Kaiser was most notable for his research of enzyme modification. He also was noted for developing new types of catalysts and for a more active form of a peptide hormone.
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George S. Myers
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
George Sprague Myers was an American ichthyologist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. He served as the editor of Stanford Ichthyological Bulletin as well as president of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. Myers was also head of the Division of Fishes at the United States National Museum, and held a position as an ichthyologist for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. He was also an advisor in fisheries and ichthyology to the Brazilian Government.
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W. Horsley Gantt
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
William Andrew Horsley Gantt was an American physiologist and psychiatrist. At the time of his death in 1980, he was one of only two surviving students of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. He spent fifty-six years of his career extending Pavlov's seminal experimental research on classical conditioning. He is also recognized for his research in psychophysiology.
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Carl Richard Moore
1892 - 1955 (63 years)
Carl Richard Moore was an American endocrinologist. He was born in rural farm region of Greene County, Missouri and received his early education in nearby Springfield. After graduating from High School, he attended Drury College where he acquired an interest in biology. In 1913, he obtained his B.S. degree, then worked as an assistant at Drury to earn his M.S. in 1914. With the granting of a fellowship, he attended the University of Chicago where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1916, with a thesis on the fertilization and parthenogenesis in sea urchin eggs. He became an associate in the universit...
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John Ernst Weaver
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
John Ernst Weaver was an American botanist, prairie ecologist, and university professor. Biography Weaver was born in Villisca, Iowa. He obtained a PhD in Biology and Botany at the University of Minnesota, 1916. He was "Instructor of Botany" at Washington State College from 1912 to 1913. In 1915 he became "Assistant professor of Botany" at the University of Nebraska where he was a plant ecology professor from 1917 until his retirement in 1952.
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Otto C. Glaser
1880 - 1951 (71 years)
Otto Charles Glaser was an American zoologist. Biography He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. His parents were of French and German descent, and he came with them to the United States while very young. He got his early education in private schools in Baltimore, and then spent two years in Baltimore City College . In 1900 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University. He stayed there to do graduate work, and in 1904 received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy His doctoral thesis was "The Larva of Fasciolaria tulipa ".
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Paul Sears
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
Paul Bigelow Sears was an American ecologist and writer. He was born in Bucyrus, Ohio. Sears attended Ohio Wesleyan University , the University of Nebraska at Lincoln , and the University of Chicago .
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Edward Hindle
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Edward Hindle FRS FRSE FIB FRGS FRPSG was a British biologist and entomologist who was Regius Professor of Zoology at the University of Glasgow from 1935 to 1943. He specialised in the study of parasites.
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Leo Szilard
1898 - 1964 (66 years)
Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea in 1936, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. According to György Marx, he was one of the Hungarian scientists known as The Martians.
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Albert Tyler
1906 - 1968 (62 years)
Albert Tyler was an American biologist whose research was focused on reproductive biology and development in marine organisms. Tyler was born in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Columbia University majoring in chemistry. When he started graduate studies he took interest in the work of Thomas Hunt Morgan. Morgan took Tyler, and several other graduate students and research fellows with him, to the California Institute of Technology when he was hired to establish the new Division of Biology. Tyler completed his Ph.D. studies on reproductive biology and was appointed to the faculty at Caltech.
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D. M. S. Watson
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Prof David Meredith Seares Watson FRS FGS HFRSE LLD was the Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College, London from 1921 to 1951. Biography Early life Watson was born in the Higher Broughton district of Salford, Lancashire, the only son of David Watson, a chemist and pioneering metallurgist, and his wife, Mary Louise Seares.
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Leo Alexander
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Leo Alexander was an American psychiatrist, neurologist, educator, and author, of Austrian-Jewish origin. He was a key medical advisor during the Nuremberg Trials. Alexander wrote part of the Nuremberg Code, which provides legal and ethical principles for scientific experiment on humans.
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Bryan Patterson
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Bryan Patterson was an American paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Life and career Bryan Patterson was the son of the soldier, engineer and author John Henry Patterson and Frances Helena Gray Patterson, who, in 1890, had been one of the first women to be granted a Doctor of Laws degree in the British Isles.
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Elizabeth C. Crosby
1888 - 1983 (95 years)
Elizabeth Caroline Crosby was an American neuroanatomist. Crosby received the National Medal of Science from President Jimmy Carter in 1979 "for outstanding contributions to comparative and human neuroanatomy and for the synthesis and transmission of knowledge of the entire nervous system of the vertebrate phylum." Her "careful descriptions" of vertebrate brains - especially reptiles - helped "outline evolutionary history" and her work as a clinical diagnostic assistant to neurosurgeons resulted in "the correlation of anatomy and surgery."
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Haldan Keffer Hartline
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Haldan Keffer Hartline was an American physiologist who was a co-recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in analyzing the neurophysiological mechanisms of vision. Education Hartline did his undergraduate studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1923. He began his study of retinal electrophysiology as a National Research Council Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, receiving his medical degree in 1927.
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Cornelis Gijsbert Gerrit Jan van Steenis
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Cornelis Gijsbert Gerrit Jan van Steenis was a Dutch botanist. Van Steenis wrote many publications on the flora of the Maritime Southeast Asia region, among others about taxonomy and plant geography. Besides his expeditions in the Malay region, he also traveled in Australia and New Zealand.
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Susumu Hagiwara
1922 - 1989 (67 years)
Susumu Hagiwara was a Japanese-born American physician and neuroscientist. Hagiwara was born and raised in Hokkaido, Japan, attending the University of Tokyo for his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees. He became a professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University before migrating to the United States to serve as professor for both the University of California, San Diego and University of California, Los Angeles.
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Sterling Howard Emerson
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Sterling Howard Emerson was an American geneticist. Emerson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951. Life Sterling Howard Emerson was born on October 29, 1900 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of Rollins Adams Emerson and Harriet Hardin. Emerson was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in 1922, and admitted as a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1928. Emerson was the professor of genetics at the California Institute of Technology from 1928 to 1971. Emerson died on May 2, 1988, in Altadena, California.
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Boris Ephrussi
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Boris Ephrussi , Professor of Genetics at the University of Paris, was a Russo-French geneticist. Boris was born on 9 May 1901 into a Jewish family. His father, Samuel Osipovich Ephrussi, was a chemical engineer; his grandfather, Joseph Ephrusi , was the founder of a banking dynasty in Kishinev. He published two papers in November 1966 which represented a key step in a decade of research in his laboratory. This research helped transform mammalian, and especially human, genetics.
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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.
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Shlomo Hestrin
1914 - 1962 (48 years)
Shlomo Hestrin was an Israeli biochemist. Biography Hestrin was born in 1914 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He emigrated with his parents to then British Mandate of Palestine, now Israel, in 1932. Awards In 1957, Hestrin was awarded the Israel Prize, in exact sciences, jointly with his research partner David Sidney Feingold and their student Gad Avigad.
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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.
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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.
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Clarence Hamilton Kennedy
1879 - 1952 (73 years)
