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,

#18701

Ferdinand Karsch

1853 - 1936 (83 years)

Ferdinand Anton Franz Karsch was a German arachnologist, entomologist and anthropologist. He also wrote on human and animal sexual diversity with his mother's maiden name included as Ferdinand Karsch-Haack from around 1905.

#18702

Victor Protopopov

1880 - 1957 (77 years)

Victor Pavlovich Protopopov was a famous Ukrainian Soviet psychiatrist and, member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Being a pupil of Vladimir Bekhterev, Protopopov founded his own pathophysiological school of thought in the Soviet psychiatry. Victor Pavlovich Protopopov authored more than 110 articles.

#18703

Henry Cotton

1876 - 1933 (57 years)

Henry Andrews Cotton was an American psychiatrist and the medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton , in Trenton, New Jersey. During his tenure from 1907 to 1930, Cotton and his staff employed experimental surgery and bacteriology techniques on patients, which included the routine removal of some or all of patients' teeth as well as tonsils, spleens, colons, ovaries, and other organs. These pseudoscientific practices persisted even after statistical reviews disproved Cotton's claims of high cure rates and revealed high mortality rates as a result of these procedures.

#18704

Alfred Merz

1880 - 1925 (45 years)

Alfred Merz was an Austrian geographer, oceanographer and director of the Institute of Marine Science in Berlin. He died of pneumonia in Buenos Aires while on an expedition to survey the South Atlantic and is buried in Perchtoldsdorf. Merz Peninsula is named after him.

#18705

John Wright

1811 - 1846 (35 years)

John Wright was an American physician and botanist. Wright was Amos Eaton's student and co-authored the last, eighth, edition of the Manual of Botany. He had one son, with Mary Cottrell, who died on September 18, 1841. In 1833, he graduated with a medical degree from Yale College. He went on to be a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a lecturer for the Rensselaer County Medical Society. For two years he associated in practice with Thomas C. Brinsmade.

#18706

Margery Knight

1889 - 1973 (84 years)

Margery Knight was an algologist, artist and lecturer at the Port Erin Marine Biological Station, University of Liverpool. Career Knight was a lecturer in botany at University of Liverpool from 1912 until she retired in 1954. She was based at the University’s Port Erin Marine Biological Station on the Isle of Man.

#18707

Heinrich Philipp August Damerow

1798 - 1866 (68 years)

Heinrich Philipp August Damerow was a German psychiatrist born in Stettin, Province of Pomerania, Prussia . He made significant contributions in the field of institutional psychiatry. In 1822 he earned his doctorate in Berlin, where he was a student of Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and psychiatrist Anton Ludwig Ernst Horn. He continued his education in Paris, where he studied under Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, and at the Siegburg asylum north of Bonn, where he met with Carl Wigand Maximilian Jacobi. In 1830 he became an associate professor, and in 1836 was appointed director of Provinzial-Irrenanstalt near Halle.

#18708

Günter Dietrich

1911 - 1972 (61 years)

Günter Dietrich was a German oceanographer. He was the first to describe the Agulhas Current in detail, he provided essential contributions to the understanding of bottom water exchange in the North Atlantic and he shaped marine research in Germany after World War II.

#18709

Chellapilla Venkata Rao

1910 - 1971 (61 years)

Chellapilla Venkata Rao was an Indian botanist. Education He was awarded his PhD from the University of Tasmania in 1957 with a thesis entitled Cytotaxonomic studies in the Proteaceae. Academic appointments He worked in the Department of Botany, Andhra University, Waltair, from 1948 to 1967. During this period he worked for three years on the Palmaceae as a senior post-doctoral fellow of the National Institute of Science of India. From 1955 to 1957, under the Colombo plan as a post-doctoral research scholar working with H.N. Barber at the University of Tasmania, he received a PhD . From 1967 ...

#18710

Johann Joseph Peyritsch

1835 - 1889 (54 years)

Johann Joseph Peyritsch was an Austrian physician and botanist born in Völkermarkt. In 1864 he earned his medical doctorate from Vienna, and from 1866 to 1871 was associated with Vienna General Hospital. He later served as custos at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, and in 1878, succeeded Anton Kerner von Marilaun as professor of botany at the University of Innsbruck, a position he maintained until his death in 1889.

#18711

Salomon Drejer

1813 - 1842 (29 years)

Salomon Thomas Nicolai Drejer was a Danish botanist. He was a friend of Japetus Steenstrup. He was recognized as an expert on sedges, being credited with describing numerous species within the genus Carex. Together with Jens Vahl and Joakim Frederik Schouw, Salomon Drejer was the publisher of Flora Danica fasc. 38.

#18712

Clara Lynch

1882 - 1985 (103 years)

Clara J. Lynch was an American biologist and cancer researcher, who notably pioneered the use of the Swiss laboratory mouse in cancer research. Background Clara Lynch was born on March 6, 1882, in Canton, Ohio, and died on December 8, 1985, in Arlington, Virginia, at the age of 103. She never married but did have two nieces named Marcia and Eliza Miller. Lynch was born to her parents William A. Lynch and Eliza R. Underhill. Her father was a prominent attorney during his time. Lynch had two other siblings named Alice Allen Lynch and Frances H. Lynch, both of whom also lived to adulthood.

#18713

Otto Deiters

1834 - 1863 (29 years)

Otto Friedrich Karl Deiters was a German neuroanatomist. He was born in Bonn, studied at the University of Bonn, and spent most of his professional career in Bonn. He is remembered for his microscopic research of the brain and spinal cord.

#18714

Lillien Jane Martin

Lillien Jane Martin

1851 - 1943 (92 years)

Lillien Jane Martin was an American psychologist. She published over twelve books. Martin experienced ageism and sexism as an early woman in psychology. Early life and education Lillien Jane Martin was born on July 7, 1851, at Olean, New York. At the age of four, she entered the nearby Olean Academy. At the age of sixteen, her talents were recognized such that she became a teacher at a girls' school in Wisconsin. By the age of 26, in 1876, she had earned enough money to return to her native New York where she enrolled at Vassar College at Poughkeepsie, New York.

#18715

Traill Green

1813 - 1897 (84 years)

Dr. Traill Green M.D., LL.D was a medical doctor, scientist, and educator. Green was actively engaged with the early years of Lafayette College, serving at various times as a professor, trustee, and acting president. He was a civic leader in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lived most of his life.

#18716

John Yule Mackay

1860 - 1930 (70 years)

John Yule Mackay was a Scottish anatomist and Academic who served as the second Principal of University College Dundee. Early life and career Mackay started his academic career as a student at the University of Glasgow. In 1881 he graduated with a MB CM and four years later was awarded an MD. He also served as assistant to Professor John Cleland, who held the chair of anatomy. He was then appointed lecturer in embryology at Glasgow, holding that position until 1894. In 1888 a report he wrote on 'The development of the branchial arches in birds’ was published in Philosophical Transactions. Ac...

#18717

Herman Pontzer

Herman Pontzer is an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, where he is associate professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health. He is best known for his research into human bioenergetics.

#18718

Henri Chermezon

1885 - 1939 (54 years)

Henri Chermezon was a French botanist. From 1906 he worked as a botanical assistant at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1919 he became chef des travaux in the department of botany at the University of Strasbourg, where he later served as a lecturer and as professor . In 1936 he was named director of its botanical garden.

#18719

Lilias Armstrong

Lilias Armstrong

1882 - 1937 (55 years)

Lilias Eveline Armstrong was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as well as the phonetics and tone of Somali and Kikuyu. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for 50 years. Armstrong also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu.

#18720

Arthur Bliss Seymour

1859 - 1933 (74 years)

Arthur Bliss Seymour was an American botanist and mycologist who specialized in parasitic fungi. Early life Seymour was born in Moline, Illinois on January 3, 1859. Before the age of five he caught scarlet fever, which left him with permanent hearing loss. This condition has been attributed to his early interest in plants and interest in becoming a naturalist. He attended Illinois University and studied botany as an undergraduate from 1878–1881. While working on his degree, he researched under the tutelage of Thomas J. Burrill, assisting in his study of the parasitic fungi of Illinois.

#18721

William H. Weston Jr.

1890 - 1978 (88 years)

William Henry Weston Jr. was an American botanist, mycologist, and first president of the Mycological Society of America. Weston was known for his research in the fungal group known as the phycomycetes, particularly the pathogenic genus Sclerospora.

#18722

Piotr Ivanov

1878 - 1942 (64 years)

Piotr Pavlovich Ivanov was a Soviet embryologist and a professor. He studied segmentation in annelids and arthropods and proposed the differentiation of two kinds of segments in segmented organisms and the developmental idea of heteronomous metamery where several segments fuse to perform a common function.

#18723

Allan Mullen

1654 - 1690 (36 years)

Allan Mullen, FRS, M.D. was an eminent Irish anatomist. Life He was born in the north of Ireland, and was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated B.A. and M.B. in 1676, and M.D. in 1684. In the latter year he was apparently elected fellow of the College of Physicians in Ireland.

#18724

Winifred Josephine Robinson

1867 - 1962 (95 years)

Winifred Josephine Robinson was an American botanist, educator, and educational administrator. As a botanist, she studied ferns and wrote several papers and books. She was the first dean of the Women's College of the University of Delaware, which was founded in 1914.

#18725

David Newth

1921 - 1988 (67 years)

Prof David Richmond Newth FRSE PhD was a British zoologist and scientific author. Life He was born near Birmingham on 10 October 1921 the son of Herbert Greenway Newth and his wife Annie Munroe Fraser, a Scot. He was educated at King Edward VI Aston School in Birmingham. He then studied Zoology at the University of London graduating BSc and gaining a postgraduate doctorate .

#18726

Douglas Alston Gilchrist

1860 - 1927 (67 years)

Douglas Alston Gilchrist FRSE FHAS was a Scottish-born professor of agriculture; author and government advisor. Early life and education The son of wealthy farmer William Gilchrist and his wife Margaret, Douglas Alston Gilchrist was born at Bothwell Park, Bothwell, South Lanarkshire, Scotland. He was the older brother of the suffragist Marion Gilchrist who, like himself, attended the famous Hamilton Academy school. Upon leaving the Academy, Gilchrist spent the next twelve years in practical farming before attending agriculture and science classes at the Glasgow Technical College, after which...

#18727

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera

1889 - 1960 (71 years)

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera was a Spanish psychiatrist. He was interested in eugenics and proposed a link between Marxism and intellectual disability. His ideas led to the thefts of many Spanish newborns and young children from their left-wing parents. As many as 30,000 children were taken from socialist families and placed with fascist families. Vallejo-Nájera was rewarded for his assistance during the Spanish Civil War and he became a leading figure in Spanish psychiatry.

#18728

Ida Kraus Ragins

1894 - 1985 (91 years)

Ida Kraus Ragins, née Kraus , was a Russian Empire-born American biochemist. Life and work Ida Kraus Ragins was born in the Russian Empire and moved to the United States before 1915. That year she started work as an assistant in quantitative analysis in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Chicago, possibly as a student job, as she received her B.A. in 1918 and her M.S. from the university the following year. Kraus Ragins taught for a year at the Oklahoma College for Women, before returning to Chicago to work on her Ph.D. which she received in 1924. She then worked as an instructor...

#18729

Ernest Alexandre Lauth

1803 - 1837 (34 years)

Ernest Alexandre Lauth was a French anatomist. He was the son of anatomist Thomas Lauth . He studied medicine at Strasbourg, receiving his doctorate in 1824 with a thesis on lymphatic vessels. He later became an associate professor of anatomy to the Faculté de médecine at Strasbourg. He was associated with several scientific societies, including being a resident member of the Société d'histoire naturelle de Strasbourg.

#18730

Hugo Carl Plaut

Hugo Carl Plaut

1858 - 1928 (70 years)

Hugo Carl Plaut was a German physician, who worked primarily as a bacteriologist and mycologist in human and animal medicine . He is best known for his discovery of the cause of Plaut–Vincent angina an infection of the tonsils caused by spirochaeta and treponema bacteria. He was also a pioneer in the field of vaccination and he created a vaccine for sheep pox.

#18731

Svend O. Heiberg

1900 - 1965 (65 years)

Svend Oluf Heiberg was a silviculturist, born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on July 22, 1900, educated at Yale University. He came to the United States in 1926, becoming a naturalized US citizen in 1934. Heiberg was Professor of Silviculture, and later Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, at the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. He and his wife, Aasa Gerlach, had two daughters, Lily and Karin, and one son, Eric. Heiberg died on February 5, 1965, in Syracuse.

#18732

Hans Sachs

1877 - 1945 (68 years)

Hans Sachs , was a German serologist. He was of Jewish ancestry. Early life and education Sachs studied at the universities of Freiburg, Breslau and Berlin. He was a student and research assistant of Paul Ehrlich. In 1900, he received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig.

#18733

Leonard Frank Spath

1882 - 1957 (75 years)

Leonard Frank Spath FRS was a British geologist specialising in malacology and ammonitology. Spath Creek on Ellesmere Island is named after him, and indirectly the Spathian substage of the Early Triassic epoch.

#18734

Magnus von Wright

Magnus von Wright

1805 - 1868 (63 years)

Magnus von Wright was a Swedish-Finnish painter and educator. In addition to bird illustrations, he was also known for his landscapes. Biography Magnus von Wright was born at the village of Haminalahti in Kuopio, Finland. His ancestors included Scottish merchants who had settled in Narva during the 17th-Century. His father Henrik Magnus von Wright was a retired Major who owned the family estate, Haminalahden. He was the eldest in a family of nine surviving children. His brothers Wilhelm von Wright and Ferdinand von Wright also became artists.

#18735

Johannes Piiper

1882 - 1973 (91 years)

Johannes Piiper was an Estonian zoologist and nature writer. In 1913 he graduated from St. Petersburg University. From 1919 to 1959 he taught at Tartu State University. From 1922 to 1940 he was the head of Kuusnõmme Biological Station. From 1922 to 1930 and 1932 to 1935 he was the head of Tartu University Zoological Museum.

#18736

Rifa'a at-Tahtawi

Rifa'a at-Tahtawi

1801 - 1873 (72 years)

Rifa'a Rafi' at-Tahtawi was an Egyptian writer, teacher, translator, Egyptologist, and intellectual of the Nahda . One of the first Egyptian travellers to France in the nineteenth century, Tahtawi published in 1834 a detailed account of his 5-year-long stay in France, Takhlīṣ al-ʾibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz , and from then on became one of the first Egyptian scholars to write about Western culture in an attempt to bring about a reconciliation and an understanding between Islamic and Christian civilizations.

#18737

Karl August von Solbrig

1809 - 1872 (63 years)

Karl August von Solbrig was a German physician and psychiatrist. He studied medicine at the universities of Munich and Erlangen, where he also served as an assistant to pathologist Adolph Henke. From 1834 he took a study trip during which he investigated the asylum systems of Germany, France and Belgium. Around 1836 he worked for several months as an assistant to psychiatrist Karl Wilhelm Ideler at the Charité hospital in Berlin, then afterwards settled as a general practitioner in his hometown of Fürth. In 1846 he was named director of the newly founded district mental hospital in Erlangen, ...

#18738

Vincent Cochrane

1916 - 1987 (71 years)

Vincent W. Cochrane was an American mycologist, whose research focused on the biochemistry and physiology of fungi. He is particularly known for his 1958 textbook, The Physiology of the Fungi. Early life and education Cochrane was born in 1916, in Plainfield, New Jersey and was brought up in Brooklyn, New York. After working in agriculture, he attended Cornell University's College of Agriculture, gaining a BS in 1939. His PhD, also at Cornell, was in the area of plant pathology, and was supervised by L. M. Massey and A. W. Dimock . It focused on common leaf rust, a disease of roses caused by the fungus Phragmidium mucronatum.

#18739

Charles Bolton

1870 - 1947 (77 years)

Charles Bolton was a British physician and pathologist. Bolton was born in Whitby, Yorkshire, the younger brother of psychiatrist Joseph Shaw Bolton . He trained as a doctor at University College Hospital in London and worked there in later life, holding the positions of resident medical officer, consulting physician, director of pathological studies and research, and lecturer in clinical medicine and general pathology at the medical school. He was also physician to the Queen's Hospital for Children. He held the degrees of Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Science and was elected Fellow of ...

#18740

Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock

1851 - 1936 (85 years)

Fanny Rysan Mulford Hitchcock was one of only 13 American women to receive their doctorates in chemistry during the 19th-century, and was the first woman to receive a doctorate in Philosophy of Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania.

#18741

Karl Nikolas Fraas

1810 - 1875 (65 years)

#18742

Sarah P. Monks

1846 - 1926 (80 years)

Sarah Preston Monks was an American naturalist, educator, scientific illustrator, and poet, based for much of her career in San Pedro, California. Monks was the first zoology instructor at Los Angeles State Normal School, a precursor to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught for over 20 years, and published on diverse topics including reptiles, amphibians, spiders, and marine biology.

#18743

Alexey Diakonoff

1907 - 1989 (82 years)

Alexey Nikolaievich Diakonoff , also transliterated as Alexej Nikolajewitsch Diakonoff, was a Russian–Dutch entomologist who specialised in Microlepidoptera. His parents immigrated to the Netherlands East Indies where, from 1923, he had his elementary education. Diakonoff then studied biology at the University of Amsterdam. A thesis on Indo-Malayan Tortricidae completed, he returned to Java in 1939 to take up a post as an entomologist at a sugar plantations and industries research station.in 1941 he was offered a position in the Bogor Zoology Museum at Bogor Botanical Gardens but the Japanese invasion intervened.

#18744

Georges de Morsier

1894 - 1982 (88 years)

Georges de Morsier was a Swiss neurologist. He studied natural sciences and medicine in Geneva and subsequently went to Paris as a resident to psychiatrist Gaétan de Clérambault. In 1928 he became Privatdozent for neurology and psychiatry and in 1941 associate professor at Geneva University, where in 1960, he was appointed professor of neurology. From 1962 onward, he was director of the neurological polyclinic of Geneva University Hospital . From 1946 to 1949 he was also president of the Swiss Neurological Society.

#18745

Albert LeRoy Andrews

1878 - 1961 (83 years)

Albert LeRoy Andrews was a professor of Germanic philology and an avocational bryologist, known as "one of the world’s foremost bryologists and the American authority on Sphagnaceae." From 1922 to 1923 he was the president of the Sullivant Moss Society, renamed in 1970 the American Bryological and Lichenological Society.

#18746

William Jesse Goad Land

William Jesse Goad Land

1865 - 1942 (77 years)

William Jesse Goad Land was an American botanist, inventor, and professor at the University of Chicago. Biography Land started taking botany classes at the University of Chicago in 1898. He earned his B.S. from the school in 1902, and his Ph.D. in 1904. He started working at the university as an assistant in morphology in 1904 and was promoted to an instructor in botany in 1908. He became assistant professor in 1911, associate professor in 1915, and a full professor in 1928. His teaching focused more heavily on laboratory studies instead of traditional lectures. He retired in 1931, but remain...

#18747

Spiridon Brusina

Spiridon Brusina

1845 - 1909 (64 years)

Spiridon Brusina was a Croatian malacologist. Together with Oton Kučera and Gjuro Pilar, he founded the Croatian Society of Natural Sciences in Zagreb in the late 1885. Taxa described Drobacia Brusina, 1904Emmericia Brusina, 1870Erjavecia Brusina, 1870Manzonia Brusina, 1870Spelaeodiscus Brusina, 1886Vidovicia Brusina, 1904Trochulus erjaveci

#18748

Frederick William Andrewes

Frederick William Andrewes

1859 - 1932 (73 years)

Sir Frederick William Andrewes was an English physician, pathologist, and bacteriologist. Biography After education at Oakley House School in Reading, Frederick Andrewes matriculated on 11 October 1878 at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1882 BA with first-class honours in natural sciences. He obtained in 1883 the Burdett Coutts University Scholarship in Geology. Having won an Open Entrance Scholarship, he began in 1885 his clinical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, where he learned bacteriology from Emanuel Edward Klein and pathology from Alfred Antunes Kanthack.

#18749

Nicolas Théobald

1903 - 1981 (78 years)

, born in Montenach on August 31, 1903 and died in Obernai on May 10, 1981, was a lorrain and French geologist, paleontologist and professor of geology at university of Besançon. He is best known for the new orientation of his state thesis on Fossil Insects from the Oligocene Lands of France . He discovered several genera and more than 300 species of insects; however, these fossils being often very close to current species, it was not their stratigraphic value that was put forward, but their biogeographical significance, making it possible to determine the climatic and environmental charact...

#18750

Robert van den Bosch

1922 - 1978 (56 years)

Robert van den Bosch was an American entomologist and proponent for the management of insect pests without the use of insecticides and especially through biological control. He was the author of the influential textbook on Biological Control first published in 1973 and a more influential popular book The Pesticide Conspiracy that aimed to inform the public of the threats of pesticides and how industrial forces influenced science and agriculture. He was among the few entomologists who took a stand against DDT and were outspoken during the public debates following the publication of Rachel Car...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions