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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#18651

Cecil Edmund Yarwood

1908 - 1981 (73 years)

Cecil Edmund Yarwood was an American-Canadian plant pathologist whose work focused on obligate parasites of plants, viruses, and conditions that predisposed plants to infections. He is considered an authority on rust and powdery mildew.

#18652

Hans Gaffron

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Dr. Hans Gaffron was born in Lima, Peru, on May 17, 1902, and was a son of the German physician Eduard Gaffron and his wife Hedwig von Gevekot. He was one of the earlier researchers trying to elucidate the mechanistic and biochemical details of photosynthesis and plant metabolism. His most notable finding was the discovery of a process whereby unicellular green algae can produce molecular Hydrogen in the presence of light, and that the precursors were derived from photosynthetic water-splitting. Applications based on his work have led to many efforts to develop H2 as a renewable biofuel.

#18653

Sewall Wright

1889 - 1988 (99 years)

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

#18654

Lee R. Dice

1887 - 1977 (90 years)

Lee Raymond Dice was an American ecologist and geneticist who taught at the University of Michigan for almost his entire career. He is known for independently developing the Sørensen–Dice coefficient.

#18655

Israel Lyon Chaikoff

1902 - 1966 (64 years)

Israel Lyon Chaikoff was a Canadian-American physiologist and biochemist, known for the Wolff–Chaikoff effect. He and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of radioactive iodine to investigate thyroid function.

#18656

Choh Hao Li

1913 - 1987 (74 years)

Choh Hao Li was a Chinese-born American biochemist who discovered, in 1966, that human pituitary growth hormone consists of a chain of 256 amino acids. In 1970 he succeeded in synthesizing this hormone, the largest protein molecule synthesized up to that time.

#18657

Joseph Needham

1900 - 1995 (95 years)

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China. A focus of his was what has come to be called the Needham Question of why and how China had ceded its leadership in Science and Technology to Western countries.

#18658

Stanford Moore

1913 - 1982 (69 years)

Stanford Moore was an American biochemist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972, with Christian B. Anfinsen and William Howard Stein, for work done at Rockefeller University on the structure of the enzyme ribonuclease and for contributing to the understanding of the connection between the chemical structure and catalytic activity of the ribonuclease molecule.

#18659

Charles Best

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Charles Herbert Best , was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin. Personal life Born in West Pembroke, Maine, on February 27, 1899, to Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, a Canadian-born physician from Nova Scotia. His father, Herbert Best, was a doctor in a small Maine town with a limited economy based mostly on sardine-packing. His mother, Lulu Newcomb, later Lulu Best, who sang soprano, accompanying herself on organ and piano, was in demand as a performer at funerals and weddings. Best grew up in Pembroke before going to Toronto, Ontario, to st...

#18660

John Howard Northrop

John Howard Northrop

1891 - 1987 (96 years)

John Howard Northrop was an American biochemist who, with James Batcheller Sumner and Wendell Meredith Stanley, won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The award was given for these scientists' isolation, crystallization, and study of enzymes, proteins, and viruses. Northrop was a Professor of Bacteriology and Medical Physics, Emeritus, at University of California, Berkeley.

#18661

David E. Green

1910 - 1983 (73 years)

David Ezra Green was an American biochemist who made significant contributions to the study of enzymes, particularly the electron transport chain and oxidative phosphorylation. Life and career Green was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jennie and Hyman Levy Green, a garment manufacturer. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Germany. He was awarded a degree in biology from New York University. He then moved to England and worked for eight years at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Malcolm Dixon, on redox reactions in biological systems. He received his P...

#18662

August Krogh

1874 - 1949 (75 years)

Schack August Steenberg Krogh was a Danish professor at the department of zoophysiology at the University of Copenhagen from 1916 to 1945. He contributed a number of fundamental discoveries within several fields of physiology, and is famous for developing the Krogh Principle.

#18663

Carl Jung

1875 - 1961 (86 years)

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He worked as a research scientist at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, in Zurich, under Eugen Bleuler. Jung established himself as an influential mind, developing a friendship with Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, conducting a lengthy correspondence, paramount to their joint vision of human psychology. Jung is widely regarded as one of the mo...

#18664

Dennis Robert Hoagland

1884 - 1949 (65 years)

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

#18665

Hallowell Davis

1896 - 1992 (96 years)

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

#18666

George Beadle

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

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

#18667

Stanley Cobb

1887 - 1968 (81 years)

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

#18668

Ralph W. Gerard

1900 - 1974 (74 years)

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

#18669

Maurice Ewing

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

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

#18670

Karl Meyer

1899 - 1990 (91 years)

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

#18671

Alexis Carrel

1873 - 1944 (71 years)

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

#18672

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

1901 - 1972 (71 years)

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

#18673

Maurice Yonge

1899 - 1986 (87 years)

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

#18674

Roger Stanier

1916 - 1982 (66 years)

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

#18675

Albert Baird Hastings

1895 - 1987 (92 years)

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

#18676

Ernst Chain

1906 - 1979 (73 years)

Sir Ernst Boris Chain was a German-born British biochemist best known for being a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on penicillin. Life and career Chain was born in Berlin, the son of Margarete and Michael Chain, a chemist and industrialist dealing in chemical products. His family was of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His father emigrated from Russia to study chemistry abroad and his mother was from Berlin. In 1930, he received his degree in chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelm University. His father descends from Zerahiah ben Shealtiel Ḥen w...

#18677

Leo Loeb

1869 - 1959 (90 years)

Leo Loeb , was a German-American physician, educator, and experimental pathologist. Early life Loeb, son of a Jewish family from the German Eifel region, was born in 1869 in Mayen, Kingdom of Prussia. He was orphaned as a child and grew up in the care of an uncle. Because of ill health, Leo was educated in schools that were located in German "spa" towns. As a teenager, he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, but his tenure there was short. Indeed, over the succeeding couple of years, he spent only brief periods at several universities, in Berlin, Freiburg, and Basel, unable to focus his interests.

#18678

Rudolf Allers

1883 - 1963 (80 years)

Rudolf Allers was an Austrian psychiatrist who was a member of the first group of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Life and career Rudolf Allers was born in Vienna on January 13, 1883. He was the son of a doctor, Mark Allers and Augusta Grailich . In 1908, he married Carola Meitner .

#18679

André Frédéric Cournand

André Frédéric Cournand

1895 - 1988 (93 years)

André Frédéric Cournand was a French-American physician and physiologist. Biography Cournand was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956 along with Werner Forssmann and Dickinson W. Richards for the development of cardiac catheterization.

#18680

David Rittenberg

David Rittenberg

1906 - 1970 (64 years)

David Rittenberg was an American biochemist who pioneered the isotopic tagging of molecules. He was born and died in New York, and spent almost the whole of his life there. He obtained his B.S. in 1929 from the City College of New York, and his Ph.D. in 1935 at Columbia University under the supervision of Harold Urey.

#18681

W. Ross Ashby

1903 - 1972 (69 years)

William Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.

#18682

Curt Stern

1902 - 1981 (79 years)

Curt Stern was a German-born American geneticist. Life Curt Jacob Stern was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany on August 30, 1902. He was the first son of Earned S. Stern, born 1862 in England, who was interned during World War I, and Anna Stern, née Anna Liebrecht who was a schoolteacher . Her father C. Liebrecht was a teacher at the Israelitische Gemeindeschule Gleiwitz, a "Gymnasium" in Upper Silesia, with a PhD in mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Breslau. His father dealt in antiques and dental supplies, and his mother was a schoolteacher. The family moved to a suburb in Berlin shortly after his birth.

#18683

Robert H. MacArthur

Robert H. MacArthur

1930 - 1972 (42 years)

Robert Helmer MacArthur was a Canadian-born American ecologist who made a major impact on many areas of community and population ecology. He is considered a founder of ecology and evolutionary biology.

#18684

Chancey Juday

1871 - 1944 (73 years)

Chancey Juday together with G. Evelyn Hutchinson, and his close collaborator, Edward A. Birge were pioneers of North American limnology. Birge and Juday founded an influential school of limnology on Lake Mendota at the University of Wisconsin. Edward Birge hired Chancey Juday through this program to help him take samples of lakes in Wisconsin. Their main sampling took place on Lake Mendota. The two, Juday and Birge, studied dissolved oxygen and temperature, leading future limnologists to a better understanding of stratification.

#18685

David Nachmansohn

1899 - 1983 (84 years)

David Nachmansohn was a German-Jewish biochemist responsible for elucidating the role of phosphocreatine in energy production in the muscles, and the role of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in nerve stimulation. He is also recognised for his basic research into the biochemistry and mechanism underlying bioelectric phenomena.

#18686

Georgios Papanikolaou

Georgios Papanikolaou

1883 - 1962 (79 years)

Georgios Nikolaou Papanikolaou was a Greek physician, zoologist and microscopist who was a pioneer in cytopathology and early cancer detection, and inventor of the "Pap smear". After studying medicine in Greece and Germany, he emigrated in 1913 to the United States and was faculty at Cornell Medical College. He first reported that uterine cancer cells could be detected in vaginal smears in 1928, but his work was not widely recognized until the 1940s. An extensive trial of his techniques was carried out in the early 1950s. In 1961, he was invited to the University of Miami to lead and develop ...

#18687

Homer W. Smith

1895 - 1962 (67 years)

Homer William Smith was an American physiologist and science writer known for his experiments on the kidney and philosophical writings on natural history and the theory of evolution. Biography Smith was born in Denver, and three years later, his family moved to Cripple Creek, Colorado, which was included in both the Cripple Creek miners' strike of 1894 and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903–04. He had a stutter from about the age of five, to which he attributes his introspectiveness. Smith's mother died by the time he was seven; he had five older siblings at the time, the oldest of which was 26....

#18688

Harry Stack Sullivan

1892 - 1949 (57 years)

Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that "personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal relationships in which [a] person lives" and that "[t]he field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which [such] relations exist". Having studied therapists Sigmund Freud, Adolf Meyer, and William Alanson White, he devoted years of clinical and research work to helping people with psychotic illness.

#18689

Charles Roy Henderson

1911 - 1989 (78 years)

Charles Roy Henderson was an American statistician and a pioneer in animal breeding — the application of quantitative methods for the genetic evaluation of domestic livestock. This is critically important because it allows farmers and geneticists to predict whether a crop or animal will have a desired trait, and to what extent the trait will be expressed. He developed mixed model equations to obtain best linear unbiased predictions of breeding values and, in general, any random effect. He invented three methods for the estimation of variance components in unbalanced settings of mixed models, ...

#18690

Simeon Burt Wolbach

1880 - 1954 (74 years)

Simeon Burt Wolbach was an American pathologist, researcher, teacher, and journal editor who elucidated the infection vectors for Rocky Mountain spotted fever and epidemic typhus. He was president of the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists and of the American Society for Experimental Pathology.

#18691

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...

#18692

Herbert Spencer Gasser

Herbert Spencer Gasser

1888 - 1963 (75 years)

Herbert Spencer Gasser was an American physiologist, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for his work with action potentials in nerve fibers while on the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, awarded jointly with Joseph Erlanger.

#18693

Robert K. Burns

1896 - 1982 (86 years)

Robert Kyle Burns was an American biologist known for his work on sexual differentiation in vertebrates. Burns was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1955. The New York Times reported in 1937 that Burns together with Thomas R. Forbes were able to change the sex of alligators by injecting them with female hormones. The National Academies Press said that Burns "pioneered the experimental manipulation of sex hormones in order to establish their roles in sex determination and differentiation".

#18694

Hudson Hoagland

1899 - 1982 (83 years)

Hudson Hoagland was an American neuroscientist, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from 1961 to 1964. Originally from Rockaway, New Jersey, he graduated from Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, and was a Guggenheim fellow. His scientific specialty was electroencephalography. He died in 1982 in Southboro, Massachusetts.

#18695

Luis Federico Leloir

Luis Federico Leloir

1906 - 1987 (81 years)

Luis Federico Leloir was an Argentine physician and biochemist who received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the metabolic pathways by which carbohydrates are synthesized and converted into energy in the body. Although born in France, Leloir received the majority of his education at the University of Buenos Aires and was director of the private research group Fundación Instituto Campomar until his death in 1987. His research into sugar nucleotides, carbohydrate metabolism, and renal hypertension garnered international attention and led to significant progress in understanding, diagnosing and treating the congenital disease galactosemia.

#18696

Maria Zambon

Maria Caterina Zambon FMedSci FRCPath, is a British virologist, director of reference microbiology for Public Health England and a professor. Her main research areas include influenza vaccination and influenza hemagglutination inhibition.

#18697

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.

#18698

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 .

#18699

Detlev Bronk

1897 - 1975 (78 years)

Detlev Wulf Bronk was a prominent American scientist, educator, and administrator. He is credited with establishing biophysics as a recognized discipline. Bronk served as president of Johns Hopkins University from 1949 to 1953 and as president of The Rockefeller University from 1953 to 1968. Bronk also held the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences between 1950 and 1962.

#18700

Victor Ernest Shelford

1877 - 1968 (91 years)

Victor Ernest Shelford was an American zoologist and animal ecologist who helped to establish ecology as a distinct field of study. He was the first president of the Ecological Society of America in 1915, and helped found the Nature Conservancy in the 1940s. Shelford's early visits and study of Volo Bog in Northern Illinois helped establish its ecological significance. Volo Bog became the first purchase of the Illinois Nature Conservancy.

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