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,
#1951
Ronald T. Raines
#25706
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ronald T. Raines is an American chemical biologist. He is the Roger and Georges Firmenich Professor of Natural Products Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for using ideas and methods of physical organic chemistry to solve important problems in biology.
Go to Profile#1952
Kay Redfield Jamison
#3815
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kay Redfield Jamison is an American clinical psychologist and writer. Her work has centered on bipolar disorder, which she has had since her early adulthood. She holds the post of the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders and Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
Go to Profile#1953
Thomas Joseph King
#39484
Overall Influence
1921 - 2000 (79 years)
Thomas J. King was an American biologist. Biography With Robert William Briggs, he worked on transplantation of somatic cell nuclei from adult frogs into enucleated oocytes this leading to the first clone of an animal in 1952. He was a scientist at the Institute for Cancer Research of the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute when the work was conducted. King and Briggs were awarded in 1972 the highest honor of the French Academy: the Grand Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer of the Académie des Sciences, Institut de France and were the first Americans to be so honored.
Go to Profile#1954
Wolfgang Wüster
#46447
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Wolfgang Wüster is a herpetologist and Professor in Zoology at Bangor University, UK. Wüster attained his bachelor's degree at the University of Cambridge in 1985 and his doctorate at the University of Aberdeen in 1990. His primary areas of research are the systematics and ecology of venomous snakes and the evolution of their venoms. He has authored approximately 180 scientific papers on varying herpetological subjects. Recent contributions have included descriptions of new species, especially of cobras, several studies into how natural selection drives the evolution of snake venoms, and dem...
Go to Profile#1955
María Soengas
#44199
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
María S. Soengas is a Spanish immunologist who is a senior scientist at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center . Her research considers melanoma and the development of new therapeutic strategies. She was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2022.
Go to Profile#1956
Beth Shapiro
#27296
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Beth Alison Shapiro is an American evolutionary molecular biologist. She is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Shapiro's work has centered on the analysis of ancient DNA. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009 and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2006.
Go to Profile#1957
John P. Moore
#30117
Overall Influence
John P. Moore is an American virologist and professor at Cornell University's Weill Cornell Medicine college, known for his research on HIV/AIDS. He previously worked at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. A former section editor of the Journal of General Virology, he is an outspoken critic of HIV/AIDS denialism, including the work of Peter Duesberg.
Go to Profile#1958
Jay Richard Stauffer Jr.
#57099
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jay Stauffer Jr. is a Distinguished Professor of Ichthyology at Pennsylvania State University. Background He received his BS from Cornell University in 1972 and his Ph.D. from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1975. From April 1975 until June 1984 he was an assistance professor for Appalachian Environmental Laboratory, Center for Environmental and Estuarine Studies at the University of Maryland. Since July 1984, he has been with the Penn State School of Forest Resources, first as an Associate Professor of Fishery Science from July 1984 to June 1988. Then as a Professor of Ichthyology from July 1988 until December 2005.
Go to Profile#1959
Paul Thompson
#43271
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Paul Thompson is a professor of neurology at the Imaging Genetics Center at the University of Southern California. Thompson obtained a bachelor's degree in Greek and Latin languages and mathematics from Oxford University. He also earned a master's degree in mathematics from Oxford and a PhD degree in neuroscience from University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#1960
Gonçalo Abecasis
#38699
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Gonçalo Rocha Abecasis is a Portuguese American biomedical researcher at the University of Michigan and was chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health. He leads a group at the Center for Statistical Genetics in the Department of Biostatistics, where he is also the Felix E. Moore Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics and director of the Michigan Genomic Initiative. His group develops statistical tools to analyze the genetics of human disease.
Go to Profile#1961
Suzanne Simard
#33590
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Suzanne Simard is a Canadian scientist who is a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. After growing up in the Monashee Mountains, British Columbia, she received her PhD in Forest Sciences at Oregon State University. Prior to teaching at the University of British Columbia, Simard worked as a research scientist at the British Columbia Ministry of Forests.
Go to Profile#1962
Cary Fowler
#16291
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Morgan Carrington "Cary" Fowler Jr. is an American agriculturalist and the former executive director of the Crop Trust, currently serving as U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security. Background Fowler was born in 1949 to Morgan, a General Sessions judge, and Betty, a dietician. He graduated from White Station High School in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1967, and attended Rhodes College in Memphis, but transferred in his junior year to Simon Fraser University in Canada, earning his B.A. Honors degree in 1971. He received a Ph.D. degree in Sociology from Uppsala University in Sweden.
Go to Profile#1963
Mark Stoneking
#43406
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mark Stoneking is a geneticist currently working as the Group Leader of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, of Max Planck Gesellschaft at Leipzig, and Honorary Professor of Biological Anthropology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. He works in the field of human evolution, especially the genetic evolution, origin and dispersal of modern humans. He, along with his doctoral advisor Allan Wilson and a fellow researcher Rebecca L. Cann, contributed to the Out of Africa Theory in 1987 by introducing the concept of Mitochondrial Eve, a hypothetical common mother of all li...
Go to Profile#1964
Moncef Slaoui
#20761
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Moncef Mohamed Slaoui is a Moroccan-born Belgian-American researcher who served as the head of Operation Warp Speed under President Donald Trump from 2020 to 2021. Slaoui is the former head of the vaccines department at GlaxoSmithKline . He worked at the company for thirty years, retiring in 2017. On May 15, 2020, President Donald Trump announced that Slaoui would manage the U.S. government's development of a vaccine used to treat coronavirus disease in OPWASP; Slaoui resigned on January 12, 2021 after successfully having helped introduce a number of vaccines to the US and global markets. In...
Go to Profile#1965
Yuan-Tsong Chen
#32629
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Yuan-Tsong Chen is a Taiwanese physician scientist, notable for his work on human genetic disorders. He is the director emeritus and distinguished research fellow of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and also tenured professor of pediatrics of Duke University Chen was a 2019 awardee of Taiwan's , as were Yuan-Pern Lee and Wei Fu-chan.
Go to Profile#1966
Henry Sherwood Lawrence
#32316
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Henry Sherwood Lawrence was an American immunologist best known for his discovery of transfer factors in 1949. He is also known for being one of founders of the new branch of biology that explores the function of lymphocytes. Lawrence was the head of the department of infectious diseases and immunology at New York University, co-director of medical services at Bellevue and New York University Hospitals, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, director of New York University's cancer center, the founding editor of the journal Cellular Immunology, director of New York University's AIDS research center.
Go to Profile#1967
Alison Jolly
#24757
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Alison Jolly was a primatologist, known for her studies of lemur biology. She wrote several books for both popular and scientific audiences and conducted extensive fieldwork on Lemurs in Madagascar, primarily at the Berenty Reserve, a small private reserve of gallery forest set in the semi-arid spiny desert area in the far south of Madagascar.
Go to Profile#1968
Noriko Osumi
#25819
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Noriko Osumi is a Japanese neuroscientist. She was appointed as the Vice-president of Tohoku University in 2018, a Professor of Developmental Neuroscience, and the Director of the Core Center for Neuroscience at that university. Osumi also presided at the Molecular Biology Society of Japan, 2013-2014.
Go to Profile#1969
Susan E. B. Folstein
#59033
Overall Influence
#1970
René Kahn
#33956
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
René Sylvain Kahn is a neuropsychiatrist and the Esther and Joseph Klingenstein Professor and System Chair of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the United States, a position he has held since 2017. He previously served as Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Brain Center Rudolf Magnus at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. Kahn is recognized for his research on the neurobiology of schizophrenia. He served as a former president of the Schizophrenia International Research Society and was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.
Go to Profile#1971
David M. Holtzman
#49645
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
David M. Holtzman is an American physician-scientist known for his work exploring the biological mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration, with a focus on Alzheimer's disease. Holtzman is former Chair of the Department of Neurology, Scientific Director of the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders, and associate director of the Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. Holtzman's lab is known for examining how apoE4 contributes to Alzheimer's disease as well as how sleep modulates amyloid beta in the brain. His work has also ...
Go to Profile#1972
Anita Roberts
#39843
Overall Influence
1942 - 2006 (64 years)
Anita Bauer Roberts was an American molecular biologist who made pioneering observations of a protein, TGF-β, that is critical in healing wounds and bone fractures and that has a dual role in blocking or stimulating cancers.
Go to Profile#1973
Barbara Pearse
#48480
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Barbara Mary Frances Pearse FRS is a British biological scientist. She works at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Education Barbara Pearse attended the independent Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton in Greater London, and gained her undergraduate degree from University College London in 1969.
Go to Profile#1974
Mihai Netea
#35503
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Mihai G. Netea is a Romanian Dutch physician and professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, specialized in infectious disease, immunology, and global health. Netea studied medicine at the Medico-Pharmaceutical Institute in Cluj-Napoca. He received a doctoral degree in 1998 at Radboud University, with a dissertation on the role of cytokines in sepsis, written under the direction of Jos van der Meer.
Go to Profile#1975
Ginés Morata
#18518
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ginés Morata Pérez ForMemRS is Research Professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain and an expert in developmental biology of the fruit fly , a specialty he has worked on for over 40 years.
Go to Profile#1976
Trudy Mackay
#24802
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Trudy Frances Charlene Mackay is the director of Clemson University's Center for Human Genetics located on the campus of the Greenwood Genetic Center. She is recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the genetics of complex traits. Mackay is also the Self Family Chair in Human Genetics and Professor of Genetics and Biochemistry at Clemson University.
Go to Profile#1977
Joel Cracraft
#47952
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Joel Lester Cracraft , is an American paleontologist and ornithologist. He received a PhD in 1969 from Columbia University . His research interests include: theory and methods of comparative biology, evolutionary theory, biological diversification, systematics, the evolution of morphological systems, historical biogeography, molecular systematics and evolution.
Go to Profile#1978
Robert R. Reisz
#42638
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert Rafael Reisz is a Canadian paleontologist and specialist in the study of early amniote and tetrapod evolution. Research career Reisz received his B.Sc. , M.Sc. and Ph.D. from McGill University as Robert L. Carroll's first doctoral graduate. After teaching as visiting lecturer at University of California, Los Angeles for a year, he accepted an appointment in the Biology Department at the University of Toronto's Mississauga Campus in 1975 where he still maintains his research lab. His research has been funded continuously by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada .
Go to Profile#1979
Lynn Kimsey
#37631
Overall Influence
Lynn Kimsey is an entomologist, taxonomist, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis since 1989. Her specialties are bees and wasps; and insect diversity and evolution.
Go to Profile#1980
Emery N. Brown
#15828
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Emery Neal Brown is an American statistician, neuroscientist, and anesthesiologist. He is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital , and a practicing anesthesiologist at MGH. At MIT he is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and professor of computational neuroscience, the associate director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the Director of the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
Go to Profile#1981
Frank Gill
#29941
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Frank Bennington Gill is an American ornithologist with worldwide research interests and birding experience. He is perhaps best known as the author of the textbook Ornithology , the leading textbook in the field.
Go to Profile#1982
Susan R. Wessler
#49724
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Susan Randi Wessler , ForMemRS, is an American plant molecular biologist and geneticist. She is Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of California, Riverside . Education Wessler graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1970. She received her bachelor's degree in 1974 in Biology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Cornell University in 1980.
Go to Profile#1983
Keith Gull
#40425
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Professor Keith Gull is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Molecular microbiology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. He was the principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford from 1 October 2009 to 30 September 2018, succeeding Michael Mingos.
Go to Profile#1984
Elwood V. Jensen
#35224
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Elwood Vernon Jensen was the Distinguished University Professor, George and Elizabeth Wile Chair in Cancer Research at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine's Vontz Center for Molecular Studies. In 2004 he received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for his research on estrogen receptors. He is considered the father of the field of hormone action.
Go to Profile#1985
Sophien Kamoun
#41249
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Sophien Kamoun is a Tunisian biologist. He is a senior scientist at the Sainsbury Laboratory and professor of biology at the University of East Anglia . Kamoun is known for contributions to our understanding of plant diseases and plant immunity.
Go to Profile#1986
Hui-lin Li
#42376
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Hui-lin Li was a Chinese botanist, academic, and researcher who worked at the University of Pennsylvania, National Taiwan University, and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Biography Hui-lin Li was born in Soochow, a city close to Shanghai. Li earned Biology degrees from Soochow University and Yenching University . In 1940, he traveled to the United States, and earned a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University in 1942. From 1943 to 1946 Li studied under Francis W. Pennell and Jacob R. Schramm at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Li was appointed to a professorship at Soochow University in 1946 and at National Taiwan University in Taipei in 1947.
Go to Profile#1987
Richard L. Hoffman
#39643
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Richard Lawrence Hoffman was an American zoologist known as an international expert on millipedes, and a leading authority on the natural history of Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains. He was a biology professor at Virginia's Radford College for almost thirty years, and curator of invertebrates at the Virginia Museum of Natural History for another twenty years. He co-founded the Virginia Natural History Society, described over 400 species of millipedes, and produced more than 480 scientific publications. He is commemorated in the scientific and/or common names of over 30 animal species, i...
Go to Profile#1988
Jules Angst
#35816
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Jules Angst is a Swiss academic who is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Zurich University in Zurich, Switzerland, and Honorary Doctor of Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, Germany. Early life Angst was born in Zurich, where he also grew up. He completed his medical and psychiatric training in Zurich under his mentor, Professor Manfred Bleuler . From 1969 to 1994, Jules Angst was Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in the University of Zurich Medical School and Head of the Research Department of Zurich University Psychiatric Hospital .
Go to Profile#1989
Kenneth Mellanby
#59390
Overall Influence
#1990
Richard Locksley
#27195
Overall Influence
Richard Locksley is a medical doctor, professor and researcher of infectious diseases, who pioneered approaches to study immunology. He is a professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, where he also serves as the director of the Sandler Asthma Basic Research Center. He is also an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. In 2018, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences for his work on immunology.
Go to Profile#1991
Susan Rae Wente
#40403
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Susan Wente is an American cell biologist and academic administrator currently serving as the 14th and current President of Wake Forest University. From 2014 to 2021 she was Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Vanderbilt University. Between August 15, 2019 and June 30, 2020, she served as interim Chancellor at Vanderbilt.
Go to Profile#1992
Nicole King
#41798
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Nicole King is an American biologist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley in molecular and cell biology and integrative biology. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2013.
Go to Profile#1993
Elisabet Sahtouris
#17009
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Elisabet Sahtouris is an evolution biologist, futurist, speaker, author and sustainability consultant to businesses, government agencies and other organizations. She is a US and Greek citizen who has lived in the US, Canada, Greece, Peru and Spain while lecturing, doing workshops and media appearances on all continents. She has a PhD from Dalhousie University in Canada. She consults with corporations and government organizations in Australia, Brazil, Europe, Asia, Africa and the United States.
Go to Profile#1994
Aravind L. Iyer
#58970
Overall Influence
Aravind L. Iyer is an evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland, United States. Since 2002, he has been Principal Investigator of the Computational Biology Branch. In his research publications he goes by the name of L. Aravind. He was brought up for the most part in Pune. He obtained his master's degree in Biotechnology and subsequently moved to the Texas A&M University to eventually complete his PhD there in December 1999.
Go to Profile#1995
Samuel Tertius Cowan
#59461
Overall Influence
#1996
Kenan Malik
#4291
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Kenan Malik is an Indian-born British writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science. As an academic author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism, and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race , Man, Beast and Zombie and Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate .
Go to Profile#1997
Richard C. Mulligan
#35821
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Richard C. Mulligan is an American scientist who is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, the Director of the Harvard Gene Therapy Initiative and a visiting scientist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the head of SanaX at Sana Biotechnology.
Go to Profile#1998
Barbara Iglewski
#45795
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Barbara Hotham Iglewski is an American microbiologist. She is director of international programs at the University of Rochester Medical Center where she is a professor of microbiology and immunology.
Go to Profile#1999
William Newsome
#36475
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
William Thomas Newsome is a neuroscientist at Stanford University who works to "understand the neuronal processes that mediate visual perception and visually guided behavior." He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2000
Vernon Cheadle
#29028
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Vernon Irvin Cheadle was an American botanist, educator and university administrator. He served as the second chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1962 until 1977. He was born in Salem, South Dakota, and received his undergraduate degree from Miami University in Ohio in 1932, and a master's degree and Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University.
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