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,
#201
J. Michael Bishop
#2468
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
John Michael Bishop is an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus and was co-winner of 1984 Alfred P. Sloan Prize. He serves as an active faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco , where he also served as chancellor from 1998 to 2009.
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Norman R. Pace
#6428
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Norman Richard Pace Jr. is an American biochemist, and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado. He is principal investigator at the Pace lab.
Go to Profile#203
Ian Wilmut
#2607
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Sir Ian Wilmut was a British embryologist and the chair of the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known as the leader of the research group that in 1996 first cloned a mammal from an adult somatic cell, a Finnish Dorset lamb named Dolly.
Go to Profile#204
Martha Chase
#5393
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Martha Cowles Chase , also known as Martha C. Epstein, was an American geneticist who in 1952, with Alfred Hershey, experimentally helped to confirm that DNA rather than protein is the genetic material of life.
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Stanley Cohen
#3517
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Stanley Cohen was an American biochemist who, along with Rita Levi-Montalcini, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for the isolation of nerve growth factor and the discovery of epidermal growth factor. He died in February 2020 at the age of 97.
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Philip Leder
#6802
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Philip Leder was an American geneticist. Early life and education Leder was born in Washington, D.C., and studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1956. In 1960, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his medical residency at the University of Minnesota.
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Bert Vogelstein
#5661
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bert Vogelstein is director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. A pioneer in the field of cancer genomics, his studies on colorectal cancers revealed that they result from the sequential accumulation of mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. These studies now form the paradigm for modern cancer research and provided the basis for the notion of the somatic evolution of cancer.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
#4594
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Native American botanist, author, an American Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology; and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry .
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Frans de Waal
#1790
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Franciscus Bernardus Maria "Frans" de Waal is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory, and author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics and Our Inner Ape . His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Roy...
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Stewart Brand
#392
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Stewart Brand is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
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Jean-Pierre Changeux
#3963
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Jean-Pierre Changeux is a French neuroscientist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of proteins , to the early development of the nervous system up to cognitive functions. Although being famous in biological sciences for the MWC model, the identification and purification of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor and the theory of epigenesis by synapse selection are also notable scientific achievements. Changeux is known by the non-scientific public for his ideas regarding the connection between mind and physical brain. As put forth in his book, C...
Go to Profile#212
Douglas J. Futuyma
#7519
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Douglas Joel Futuyma is an American evolutionary biologist. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York and a Research Associate on staff at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His research focuses on speciation and population biology. Futuyma is the author of a widely used undergraduate textbook on evolution and is also known for his work in public outreach, particularly in advocating against creationism.
Go to Profile#213
May-Britt Moser
#2670
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
May-Britt Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . She and her former husband, Edvard Moser, shared half of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for work concerning the grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, as well as several additional space-representing cell types in the same circuit that make up the positioning system in the brain. Together with Edvard Moser she established the Moser research environment at NTNU, which they lead. Since 2012 she has he...
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Colin Groves
#3255
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
Colin Peter Groves was a British-Australian biologist and anthropologist. Groves was Professor of Biological Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Education Born in England, Groves completed a Bachelor of Science at University College London in 1963, and a Doctor of Philosophy at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in 1966. From 1966 to 1973, he was a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Queen Elizabeth College and the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#215
Keith R. Porter
#8145
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Keith Roberts Porter was a Canadian-American cell biologist. He created pioneering biology techniques and research using electron microscopy of cells. Porter also contributed to the development of other experimental methods for cell culture and nuclear transplantation. He was also responsible for naming the endoplasmic reticulum, conducting work on the 9 + 2 microtubule structure in the axoneme of cilia, and coining the term "microtrabecular lattice." In collaborations with other scientists, he contributed to the understanding of cellular structures and concepts such as compartmentalization, flagella, centrioles, fibrin, collagen, T-tubules and sarcoplasmic reticulum.
Go to Profile#216
Harvey Lodish
#6890
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Harvey Franklin Lodish is a molecular and cell biologist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and lead author of the textbook Molecular Cell Biology. Lodish's research focused on cell surface proteins and other important areas at the interface between molecular cell biology and medicine.
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Yoshiki Sasai
#6785
Overall Influence
1962 - 2014 (52 years)
Yoshiki Sasai was a Japanese stem cell biologist. He developed methods to guide human embryonic stem cells into forming brain cortex, eyes , and other organs in tissue culture. Sasai worked at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, and was Director of the Laboratory for Organogenesis and Neurogenesis. Following his involvement in the 2014 STAP cell controversy, Sasai was found dead at Riken from an apparent suicide.
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Roger Y. Tsien
#4202
Overall Influence
1952 - 2016 (64 years)
Roger Yonchien Tsien was an American biochemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, in collaboration with organic chemist Osamu Shimomura and neurobiologist Martin Chalfie. Tsien was also a pioneer of calcium imaging.
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Thomas A. Steitz
#3181
Overall Influence
1940 - 2018 (78 years)
Thomas Arthur Steitz was an American biochemist, a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, best known for his pioneering work on the ribosome.
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Christof Koch
#1400
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christof Koch is a German-American neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
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Judah Folkman
#4085
Overall Influence
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Moses Judah Folkman was an American biologist and pediatric surgeon best known for his research on tumor angiogenesis, the process by which a tumor attracts blood vessels to nourish itself and sustain its existence. He founded the field of angiogenesis research, which has led to the discovery of a number of therapies based on inhibiting or stimulating neovascularization.
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Michael W. Young
#5584
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael Warren Young is an American biologist and geneticist. He has dedicated over three decades to research studying genetically controlled patterns of sleep and wakefulness within Drosophila melanogaster.
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Ronald W. Davis
#8008
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ronald Wayne "Ron" Davis is professor of biochemistry and genetics, and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center at Stanford University. Davis is a researcher in biotechnology and molecular genetics, particularly active in human and yeast genomics and the development of new technologies in genomics, with over 30 biotechnology patents. In 2013, it was said of Davis that "A substantial number of the major genetic advances of the past 20 years can be traced back to Davis in some way."
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Francisco Varela
#611
Overall Influence
1946 - 2001 (55 years)
Francisco Javier Varela García was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.
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Jean Dausset
#2406
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset was a French immunologist born in Toulouse, France. Dausset received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1980 along with Baruj Benacerraf and George Davis Snell for their discovery and characterisation of the genes making the major histocompatibility complex. Using the money from his Nobel Prize and a grant from the French Television, Dausset founded the Human Polymorphism Study Center in 1984, which was later renamed the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH in his honour. He married Rose Mayoral in 1963, with whom he had two children, Henri and Irène. ...
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John Zachary Young
#5065
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
John Zachary Young FRS , generally known as "JZ" or "JZY", was an English zoologist and neurophysiologist, described as "one of the most influential biologists of the 20th century". Biography Young went to school at Marlborough College. In 1928, he received a first class honours degree in zoology from Magdalen College, Oxford. On Oct. 12, 1942, Young spoke at the Socratic Club in Oxford on the topic "Purpose and Design in Nature" as part of the series of talks and debates led by C. S. Lewis. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and served as Professor of Anatomy at University College London from then until 1974.
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David Botstein
#6851
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Botstein is an American biologist serving as the chief scientific officer of Calico. He served as the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University from 2003 to 2013, where he remains an Anthony B. Evnin Professor of Genomics.
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Jacques Gauthier
#7022
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jacques Armand Gauthier is an American vertebrate paleontologist, comparative morphologist, and systematist, and one of the founders of the use of cladistics in biology. Life and career Gauthier is the son of Edward Paul Gauthier and Patricia Marie Grogan. He received a B.S. degree in zoology at San Diego State University in 1973, a master's in biological science at the same institute in 1980, and a PhD in paleontology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984. Currently he is a professor of geology and geophysics and ecology and evolutionary biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology at Yale University.
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Richard Lenski
#4431
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Richard Eimer Lenski is an American evolutionary biologist, a Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology, Genetics and Evolution, and Evolution of Pathogen Virulence at Michigan State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow. Lenski is best known for his still ongoing -year-old long-term E. coli evolution experiment, which has been instrumental in understanding the core processes of evolution, including mutation rates, clonal interference, antibiotic resistance, the evolution of novel traits, and speciation. He is also well known for h...
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Terry Sejnowski
#2668
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology. He has performed pioneering research in neural networks and computational neuroscience.
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Isaac Asimov
#62
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.
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Antonio Damasio
#777
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years. Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books: his work, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain , explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Damasio's research in neu...
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Aziz Sancar
#1866
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Aziz Sancar is a Turkish-American molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He has made contributions on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field.
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Mark Ptashne
#7941
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Mark Ptashne is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Ptashne grew up in Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1961 and his PhD from Harvard in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of Harvard. He was made professor there in 1971 and became chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1980. In 1993 he was awarded an endowed chair, and in 1997 he left Harvard for MSK.
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Harold E. Varmus
#3798
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Harold Eliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.
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Elisabeth Lloyd
#2767
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Elisabeth Anne Lloyd is an American philosopher of science specialising in the philosophy of biology. She is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine - as well as Adjunct Professor of biology - at Indiana University, Bloomington, affiliated faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.
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David Bartel
#9291
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David P. Bartel is an American molecular biologist best known for his work on microRNAs. Bartel is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Member of the Whitehead Institute, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute .
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Thomas Huckle Weller
#4426
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Thomas Huckle Weller was an American virologist. He, John Franklin Enders and Frederick Chapman Robbins were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954 for showing how to cultivate poliomyelitis viruses in a test tube, using a combination of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue.
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Katalin Karikó
#2773
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Katalin "Kati" Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist who specializes in ribonucleic acid -mediated mechanisms, particularly in vitro-transcribed messenger RNA for protein replacement therapy. Karikó laid the scientific groundwork for mRNA vaccines, overcoming major obstacles and skepticism in the scientific community. Karikó received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for her work, along with American immunologist Drew Weissman.
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Masanobu Fukuoka
#4342
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Masanobu Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He was a proponent of no-till, herbicide and pesticide free cultivation methods from which he created a particular method of agriculture, commonly referred to as "natural farming" or "do-nothing farming".
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Tomoko Ohta
#7816
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
is a Japanese scientist and Professor Emeritus of the National Institute of Genetics. Ohta works on population genetics/molecular evolution and is known for developing the nearly neutral theory of evolution.
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Brenda Milner
#1626
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (106 years)
Brenda Milner is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. , she holds more than 25 honorary degrees and she continued to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as the founder of neuropsychology and has been essential in its development.
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Aaron Ciechanover
#1367
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Aaron Ciechanover is an Israeli biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for characterizing the method that cells use to degrade and recycle proteins using ubiquitin. Biography Early life Ciechanover was born in Haifa, British Mandate of Palestine on 1 October 1947 into a Jewish family. He is the son of Bluma , a teacher of English, and Yitzhak Ciechanover, an office worker. His mother and father supported the Zionist movement and immigrated to Israel from Poland in the 1920s.
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Robert Costanza
#2190
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Costanza is an American/Australian ecological economist and Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Full Member of the Club of Rome.
Go to Profile#245
Samuel Rahbar
#1677
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Samuel Rahbar was an Iranian scientist who discovered the linkage between diabetes and HbA1C, a form of hemoglobin used primarily to identify plasma glucose concentration over time. Rahbar was born into a Jewish family in the Iranian city of Hamedan in 1929. He obtained his MD degree from the University of Tehran in 1953 and a PhD degree in immunology from the same university in 1963.
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Philip J. Currie
#5776
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Philip J. Currie is a professor at the University of Alberto in Edmonton and the founder of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. He earned his bachelor of science from the University of Toronto, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in biology from McGill University. Currie has been very active in fossil discovery, working on sites in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, Antarctica, Mongolia, China, and Argentina. He was the curator of earth sciences for the Provincial Museum of Alberta while he worked on his Ph.D. So successful was he with his fieldwork that the museum had to expand.
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Thomas Cavalier-Smith
#8993
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Thomas Cavalier-Smith, FRS, FRSC, NERC Professorial Fellow , was a professor of evolutionary biology in the Department of Zoology, at the University of Oxford. His research has led to discovery of a number of unicellular organisms and advocated for a variety of major taxonomic groups, such as the Chromista, Chromalveolata, Opisthokonta, Rhizaria, and Excavata. He was known for his systems of classification of all organisms.
Go to Profile#248
Kenneth Carpenter
#4390
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Kenneth Carpenter is a paleontologist. He is the former director of the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum and author or co-author of books on dinosaurs and Mesozoic life. His main research interests are armored dinosaurs , as well as the Early Cretaceous dinosaurs from the Cedar Mountain Formation in eastern Utah.
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Thomas D. Pollard
#8618
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Thomas Dean Pollard is a prominent educator, cell biologist and biophysicist whose research focuses on understanding cell motility through the study of actin filaments and myosin motors. He is Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and a professor of cell biology and molecular biophysics & biochemistry at Yale University. He was dean of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 2010 to 2014, and president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1996 to 2001.
Go to Profile#250
Peter Walter
#7349
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Peter Walter is a German-American molecular biologist and biochemist. He is currently the Director of the Bay Area Institute of Science at Altos Labs and an emeritus professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the University of California, San Francisco . He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator until 2022.
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