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).

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#1901

Ronald S. Weinstein

Ronald S. Weinstein

#18321

Overall Influence

1938 - 2021 (83 years)

Ronald S. Weinstein was an American pathologist. He was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Tucson. Weinstein served for 32 years as an academic pathology department chair, in Chicago, Illinois and then Tucson, Arizona, while also serving as a serial entrepreneur engaged in university technology transfer.

#1902

Fred Spiess

#38363

Overall Influence

1919 - 2006 (87 years)

Dr. Fred Noel Spiess was a naval officer, oceanographer and marine explorer. His work created new advances in marine technology including the FLIP Floating Instrument Platform, the Deep Tow vehicle for study of the seafloor, and the use of acoustics for underwater navigation and geodetic positioning.

#1903

Jürgen Aschoff

#37969

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Jürgen Walther Ludwig Aschoff was a German physician, biologist and behavioral physiologist. Together with Erwin Bünning and Colin Pittendrigh, he is considered to be a co-founder of the field of chronobiology.

#1904

Minor J. Coon

#36803

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

Minor Jesser Coon was an American biochemist and Victor V Vaughan Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is best known for his research on cytochrome P-450 and as the co-discoverer of HMG-CoA, along with Bimal Kumar Bachhawat. He died on September 5, 2018, from complications due to Alzheimer's disease.

#1905

Suzanna Lewis

#44196

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Suzanna E. Lewis was a scientist and Principal investigator at the Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Project based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory until her retirement in 2019. Lewis led the development of open standards and software for genome annotation and ontologies.

#1906

Emmett Chappelle

Emmett Chappelle

#37584

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Emmett W. Chappelle was an American scientist who made valuable contributions in the fields of medicine, philanthropy, food science, and astrochemistry. His achievements led to his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on bioluminescence, in 2007. Being honored as one of the 100 most distinguished African American scientists of the 20th Century, he was also one of the members of the American Chemical Society, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society of Photobiology, the American Society of Microbiology, and the American Society...

#1907

George M. Garrity

#58038

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

#1908

Jonathan Kipnis

#35683

Overall Influence

Jonathan Kipnis is a neuroscientist, immunologist, and professor of pathology and immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine. His lab studies interactions between the immune system and nervous system. He is best known for his lab's discovery of meningeal lymphatic vessels in humans and mice, which has impacted research on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis, neuropsychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and Rett syndrome.

#1909

Jeremy K. Nicholson

#21848

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jeremy K. Nicholson is a professor and pro vice chancellor of Health Sciences at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, where he leads the Australian National Phenome Centre. He is also an emeritus professor of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College London and was the director and principal investigator of the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre until 2018.

#1910

David Sanders

#13568

Overall Influence

David Sanders is an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University. He grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Yale College in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He conducted his Ph.D. research in Biochemistry with Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., who was then editor of the journal Science, at the University of California at Berkeley. Sanders demonstrated that the response regulators in the two-component regulatory systems were phosphorylated on an aspartate residue and that they were protein phosphatases with a covalent intermediate.

#1911

Winslow Briggs

#47479

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Winslow Russell Briggs was an American plant biologist who introduced techniques from molecular biology to the field of plant biology. Briggs was an international leader in molecular biological research on plant sensing, in particular how plants respond to light for growth and development and the understanding of both red and blue-light photoreceptor systems in plants. His work has made substantial contributions to plant science, agriculture and ecology.

#1912

Steve A. Kay

#40121

Overall Influence

Steve A. Kay is a British-born chronobiologist who mainly works in the United States. Dr. Kay has pioneered methods to monitor daily gene expression in real time and characterized circadian gene expression in plants, flies and mammals. In 2014, Steve Kay celebrated 25 years of successful chronobiology research at the Kaylab 25 Symposium, joined by over one hundred researchers with whom he had collaborated with or mentored. Dr. Kay, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., briefly served as president of The Scripps Research Institute. and is currently a professor at the University of Southern California.

#1913

Hideyuki Okano

#22462

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Hideyuki Okano is a Japanese physiology professor and the current dean of Keio University School of Medicine. He is also the team leader of the Laboratory for Marmoset Neural Architecture, at RIKEN Brain Science Institute. His lab is the first in the world to produce transgenic marmosets with germline transmission. He is a director of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

#1914

Joan Brugge

#50424

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Joan S. Brugge is the Louise Foote Pfeiffer Professor of Cell Biology and the Director of the Ludwig Center at Harvard Medical School, where she also served as the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology from 2004 to 2014. Her research focuses on cancer biology, and she has been recognized for her explorations into the Rous sarcoma virus, extracellular matrix adhesion, and epithelial tumor progression in breast cancer.

#1915

Zhijian Chen

#40094

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Zhijian "James" Chen is a Chinese-American biochemist and professor in the department of molecular biology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He is best known for his discovery of mechanisms by which nucleic acids trigger innate and autoimmune responses from the interior of a cell, work for which he received the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

#1916

Kate Jones

#39298

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Katherine Elizabeth Jones is a British biodiversity scientist, with a special interest in bats. She is Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity, and Director of the Biodiversity Modelling Research Group, at University College London. She is a past chair of the Bat Conservation Trust.

#1917

James W. Valentine

#36998

Overall Influence

1926 - 2023 (97 years)

James William Valentine was an American evolutionary biologist, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and curator at the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

#1918

Robert H. Singer

Robert H. Singer

#37552

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Dr. Robert H. Singer received an undergraduate degree in physical chemistry from Oberlin College, and a PhD in developmental biology from Brandeis University. He did postdoctoral work in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Oberlin College granted Singer an Honorary Doctor of Science in 2016. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem granted Singer an Honorary Doctorate in 2018.

#1919

James Baddiley

#34084

Overall Influence

1918 - 2008 (90 years)

Sir James Baddiley FRS FRSE was a British biochemist. Early life and education Baddiley was born and brought up in Manchester. His father was director of research at the ICI dyestuffs division in Blackley. He attended Manchester Grammar School and Manchester University in 1937 to read chemistry obtaining a BSc and MSc. He was accepted as a PhD student by the Nobel prizewinner Alexander Todd.

#1920

Martin Holdgate

#28647

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Sir Martin Wyatt Holdgate is an English biologist and environmental scientist. Early life Holdgate was born in Horsham, England on 14 January 1931, grew up in Blackpool, and was educated at Arnold School. He then attended Cambridge University as an undergraduate at Queens' College, Cambridge from 1949, graduating in 1952 with degrees in zoology and botany and, subsequently, a doctorate in insect physiology.

#1921

Nobuyuki Tanaka

#56716

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

is an economic botanist at the Tokyo Metropolitan University, the Makino Botanical Garden in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan. Tanaka is an expert on the family Cannaceae, and in 2001 published a revision of the family Cannaceae in the New World and Asia. Another contribution by Dr. Tanaka is to revise the Flora of Myanmar.

#1922

Philip Ingham

#22520

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Philip William Ingham FRS, FMedSci, Hon. FRCP is a British geneticist, currently the Toh Kian Chui Distinguished Professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, a partnership between Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Imperial College, London. Previously, he was the inaugural Director of the Living Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, UK and prior to that was Vice Dean, Research at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine.

#1923

Alice Alldredge

#31780

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Alice Alldredge is an American oceanographer and marine biologist who studies marine snow, carbon cycling, microbes and plankton in the ecology of the ocean. She has conducted research in the open sea, at her laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as in collaboration with the Long Term Ecological Research Network at the Mo'orea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research Site in Mo'orea, French Polynesia. According to the annual ISI Web of Knowledge list published by Thomson Reuters, she has been one of the most cited scientific researchers since 2003.

#1924

Gordon Parker

#15506

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gordon Barraclough Parker AO is an Australian psychiatrist who is scientia professor of psychiatry at the University of New South Wales . Parker’s particular focus is on the phenomenology and epidemiology of mood disorders, social psychiatry, and the treatment and management of mood disorders. His research has assisted in modelling psychiatric conditions – depression, bipolar and personality disorders – and examining causes, mechanisms and treatments for mood disorders, together with innovative clinical work. Parker is a critic of the current unitary classification of major depressive disorder , and has proposed the revival of the diagnosis of melancholia.

#1925

Wallace Stegner

#1924

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

Wallace Earle Stegner was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.

#1926

Vincent Massey

#50764

Overall Influence

1926 - 2002 (76 years)

Vincent Massey was an Australian biochemist and enzymologist best known for his contributions to the study of flavoenzymes. Massey was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 for his use of physical biochemistry to relate flavin chemistry to flavin enzymology.

#1927

Emile Boulpaep

#34948

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Emile Louis Boulpaep is a Belgian physiologist and since 1977 President of the Belgian American Educational Foundation. He is a member of the board of the Francqui Foundation. Education He studied medicine at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven , where he received a medical degree in 1962. In 1987 he obtained an honorary M.A. from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

#1928

Clifford Tabin

#47930

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Clifford James Tabin is chairman of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Education Tabin was educated at the University of Chicago where he was awarded a BS in physics in 1976. He went on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was awarded a PhD in 1984 for work on the regulation of gene expression in the Ras subfamily of oncogenes supervised by Robert Weinberg based in the MIT Department of Biology. In Weinberg's lab, Tabin constructed murine leukemia virus, the first recombinant retrovirus that could be used as a eukaryotic vector.

#1929

Elaine Tuomanen

#49149

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Elaine I. Tuomanen is an American pediatrician and chair of the Department of Infectious Diseases at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. She is noted for her research on Molecular pathogenesis of Streptococcus pneumoniae.

#1930

Marion Koopmans

Marion Koopmans

#36356

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Maria Petronella Gerarda Koopmans is a Dutch virologist who is Head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience. Her research considers emerging infectious diseases, noroviruses and veterinary medicine. In 2018 she was awarded the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research Stevin Prize. She serves on the scientific advisory group of the World Health Organization.

#1931

Cathie Martin

#52229

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Catherine Rosemary Martin is a Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of East Anglia and project leader at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, co-ordinating research into the relationship between diet and health and how crops can be fortified to improve diets and address escalating chronic disease globally.

#1932

Ehud Gazit

#21112

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Ehud Gazit is an Israeli biochemist, biophysicist and nanotechnologist. He is Professor and Endowed Chair at Tel Aviv University and a member of the executive board of the university . In 2015, he was knighted by the Italian Republic for services to science and society. He was recently elected as the 2023 International Solvey Chair in Chemistry, a position that was previously held by 15 of the top world scientists including three Nobel laureates.

#1933

Anthony Trewavas

#35458

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Anthony James Trewavas FRS FRSE is Emeritus Professor in the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Edinburgh best known for his research in the fields of plant physiology and molecular biology. His research investigates plant behaviour.

#1934

Silvia Arber

#49056

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Silvia Arber is a Swiss neurobiologist. She teaches and researches at both the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel Switzerland.

#1935

Norio Niikawa

#13496

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

was a Japanese physician and medical geneticist who discovered an autosomal dominant disorder, Kabuki syndrome, also known as Niikawa-Kuroki syndrome. Contribution Niikawa made an important contribution in the field of medical genetics. In 1981, he discovered a novel syndrome, Kabuki syndrome, and later he and his colleagues also identified a gene for the syndrome. In 2006, his research group identified a single nucleotide polymorphism in the ABCC11 gene is the determinant of human earwax type.

#1936

Peter Milner

#17173

Overall Influence

1919 - 2018 (99 years)

Peter Milner was a British-born Canadian neuroscientist. Biography Milner was born in Silkstone Common and grew up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England. His father was David William Milner, a research chemist, and his mother was Edith Anne Marshall, an ex-schoolteacher.

#1937

Edward J. Steele

Edward J. Steele

#38618

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Edward J. "Ted" Steele is an Australian molecular immunologist with interests in virology and evolution. He is an honorary research associate at the C.Y.O'Connor ERADE Village Foundation in Piara Waters, WA, Australia.

#1938

Diethard Tautz

#56619

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Diethard Tautz is a German biologist and geneticist, who is primarily concerned with the molecular basis of the evolution of mammals. Since 2006 he is director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön.

#1939

James R. Dixon

#22732

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

James Ray Dixon was professor emeritus and curator emeritus of amphibians and reptiles at the Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collection at Texas A&M University. He lived in El Campo, Texas, throughout most of his childhood. He published prolifically on the subject of herpetology in his distinguished career, authoring and co-authoring several books, book chapters, and numerous peer reviewed notes and articles, describing two new genera, and many new species, earning him a reputation as one of the most prominent herpetologistss of his generation. His main research focus was morphology based systema...

#1940

John Shine

#28054

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

John Shine is an Australian biochemist and molecular biologist. Shine and Lynn Dalgarno discovered a nucleotide sequence, called the Shine-Dalgarno sequence, necessary for the initiation of protein synthesis. He directed the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney from 1990 to 2011. From 2018 to 2022, Shine was President of the Australian Academy of Science.

#1941

Matthias Hentze

Matthias Hentze

#34198

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Matthias Werner Hentze is a German scientist. He is the director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory , co-director of the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit between EMBL and Heidelberg University, and Professor of Molecular Medicine at Heidelberg University.

#1942

Alan Trounson

#16888

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Alan Osborne Trounson is an Australian embryologist with expertise in stem cell research. Trounson was the President of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine between 2007 and 2014, a former Professor of Stem Cell Sciences and the Director of the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories at Monash University, and retains the title of emeritus professor.

#1943

Robert B. Payne

#55444

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Robert Berkeley Payne is an ornithologist, professor and curator at the Museum of Zoology and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan. Academic background Payne had completed his B.S. at the University of Michigan in 1960, and Ph.D. at the University of California in 1965. He was awarded an NSF postdoctoral fellowship by the University of Cape Town. He was awarded the 2010 Margaret Morse Nice Medal by the Wilson Ornithological Society.

#1944

Leslie Holdridge

#26647

Overall Influence

1907 - 1999 (92 years)

Leslie Ransselaer Holdridge was an American botanist and climatologist. He was the father of composer Lee Holdridge as well as the father of Leslie A. Holdridge, Lorena Holdridge, Marbella Holdridge, Marly Holdridge, Marisela Holdridge, Thania Holdridge, John Holdridge, Ida Holdridge, Reuseland Holdridge, Leythy J. Holdridge and youngest son Gregory Holdridge whom he fathered with Costa Rican Clara Luz Melendez.

#1945

Maria Ragland Davis

#41666

Overall Influence

1959 - 2010 (51 years)

Maria Ragland Davis was an American biologist and educator. She was associate professor of Biology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville where she studied molecular biology and plant genetics. Life and career A native of Detroit, she received her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in the same discipline from North Carolina State University. Following the receipt of her master's degree, Davis completed her doctorate in biochemistry and plant biology. Davis studied strawberries, looking at the genetic makeup of strains that we...

#1946

A. Carl Leopold

#20216

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Aldo Carl Leopold was an American academic and plant physiologist, son of Aldo Leopold, a noted ecologist. He is known for his research on soybeans which led to techniques allowing insulin to be dried and later processed into an inhalable insulin.

#1947

David Fleay

#27984

Overall Influence

1907 - 1993 (86 years)

David Howells Fleay was an Australian scientist and biologist who pioneered the captive breeding of endangered species, and was the first person to breed the platypus in captivity. He died on 7 August 1993 aged 86.

#1948

Leslie Pedley

#40707

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Leslie Pedley was an Australian botanist who specialised in the genus Acacia. He is notable for bringing into use the generic name Racosperma, creating a split in the genus, which required some 900 Australian species to be renamed, because the type species of Acacia, Acacia nilotica, now Vachellia nilotica, had a different lineage from the Australian wattles. However, the International Botanical Congress , held in Melbourne in 2011, ratified its earlier decision to retain the name Acacia for the Australian species, but to rename the African species.

#1949

Stefan Rahmstorf

Stefan Rahmstorf

#18277

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Stefan Rahmstorf is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He studied physical oceanography at Bangor University and received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Victoria University of Wellington . His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change. He was one of the lead authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

#1950

Marc Wilkins

#44385

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Marc R. Wilkins is an Australian scientist who is credited with the defining the concept of the proteome. Wilkins is a Professor in the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

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