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,
#2001
Yehudah L. Werner
#40924
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Yehudah Leopold Werner is an Israeli herpetologist and Professor Emeritus at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . He and his parents were forced to flee from Nazi Germany in 1933, and reached Palestine via France and England in 1935. Georg Haas , an emigrant from Austria who was Professor in Jerusalem, guided his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During his long scientific career, Werner published more than 400 titles. Among other things, the biology of the geckos, including their vocal communication, as well as the zoogeography and conservation of the reptiles and amphibians in the Middle East are his main themes.
Go to Profile#2002
Frank Edwin Egler
#31457
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Frank Edwin Egler was an American plant ecologist and pioneer in the study of vegetation science. In addition to his groundbreaking research, he assisted Rachel Carson in preparing Silent Spring. Early life and education Egler was born in New York City, growing up on Manhattan's West Side. Fifth-grade bird-watching trips to green spaces in the city instilled a love of nature in the frail boy. He went on to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse, to pursue a career in landscape engineering, but switched to plant ecology and the University of Chicago, graduating in 1932. At Chicago, he was a student in the last course taught by Henry C.
Go to Profile#2003
Cyrus Longworth Lundell
#27922
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
Cyrus Longworth Lundell was an American botanist. Education Lundell did his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and Southern Methodist University. He completed his BA at the later in 1932. He then entered New York University's graduate school of business administration, but seems not to have completed course work there. He received an M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1934 and a Ph.D. from the same institution in 1936. It appears based on his later professorship that his Ph.D. was in botany.
Go to Profile#2004
Brian D. Farrell
#44736
Overall Influence
Brian Dorsey Farrell is a professor of biology and curator in entomology at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. , Farrell is also Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2005
Gonzalo Giribet
#52447
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Gonzalo Giribet is a Spanish-American invertebrate zoologist and Alexander Agassiz Professor of zoology working on systematics and biogeography at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard University. He is a past president of the International Society for Invertebrate Morphology, of the Willi Hennig Society, and vice-president of the Sociedad Española de Malacología .
Go to Profile#2006
Mentor Përmeti
#39625
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Prof. Dr. Mentor Përmeti was an Albanian agronomist. Biography He pursued his high school in his native city and graduated in the Sofia University, Bulgaria, in 1951. He returned to Albania upon graduation and started to work at the Institute of Agricultural Research. Subsequently he worked at the Department of Agriculture of Albania with different responsibilities. In 1956 he started working as a director at the Agricultural University of Tirana, and, in 1958, he became director of the Institute of Agricultural Research, which had by then transferred to the city of Lushnjë. In 1961 he returned as a vice-provost of the Agricultural University of Tirana.
Go to Profile#2007
David W. Krause
#48744
Overall Influence
David W. Krause is a Canadian-born vertebrate paleontologist currently working as Senior Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which he joined in 2016. Prior to that he was a Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University, where he was employed for 34 years. His work primarily focuses on fossils from the Cretaceous period of Madagascar, and he often travels to the island to uncover new fossils. He is most famous for his discoveries of Majungasaurus crenatissimus and Beezlebufo ampinga. Rapetosaurus krausei, another dinosaur from Madagascar, is named in his honor.
Go to Profile#2008
Raymond L. Erikson
#54672
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Raymond L. Erikson was a molecular biologist and virologist who noted research on cell growth and regulation. He also served as the John F. Drum American Cancer Society Professor of Cellular and Developmental Biology at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2009
Lelio Orci
#59950
Overall Influence
#2010
Charles B. Wilson
#59967
Overall Influence
#2011
Josef Penninger
#52033
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Josef Penninger is an Austrian biomedical researcher specialising in molecular immunology. He was the scientific director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology located at the Vienna Biocenter until 2018. In February 2018, he announced his decision to leave Vienna and become the head of the Life Sciences Institute of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Go to Profile#2012
Daniela Stock
#40605
Overall Influence
Daniela Stock is an Australian scientist at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute with a conjoint position at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is a structural biologist whose research has provided insight into the molecular picture of rotary ATPases.
Go to Profile#2013
Sandra Knapp
#46716
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sandra Diane Knapp is an American-born botanist. She is a merit researcher of the Plants Division of the Natural History Museum, London and from 2018 was the president of the Linnean Society of London. While working at the Natural History Museum, London she has overseen the Flora Mesoamericana inventory of Central American plants. She has published several books on botanical subjects as well as a significant number of scientific articles. In 2016 she was awarded the Linnean Medal. In 2022 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2023 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of t...
Go to Profile#2014
Thomas Sakmar
#36115
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Thomas P. Sakmar is an American physician-scientist and the former acting president of The Rockefeller University. Prior to becoming acting president he was associate dean for graduate studies in the Tri-Institutional MD–PhD Program.
Go to Profile#2015
Patricia Louise Dudley
#47500
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Patricia Louise Dudley was an American zoologist specializing in research of copepods. An early pioneer using an electron microscope to study copepod organs and tissues, she taught at Barnard College for 35 years and served as Chair of the Biological Sciences department. Dudley was a National Science Foundation faculty fellow. She donated funds to establish the Patricia L. Dudley Endowment at Friday Harbor Labs, where she conducted research.
Go to Profile#2016
Roy Curtiss
#37747
Overall Influence
Roy Curtiss III is a professor of Genomics, Evolution, & Bioinformatics at the University of Florida. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2001. Education Curtiss earned his B.S. degree from Cornell University in 1956 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1962. At Cornell, he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society.
Go to Profile#2017
Jörg-Peter Ewert
#34081
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Jörg-Peter Ewert is a German neurophysiologist and researcher in the field of Neuroethology. From 1973 to 2006, he served as a university professor in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Kassel, Germany.
Go to Profile#2018
Manfred Milinski
#34753
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Manfred Milinski is a German biologist who was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology Career He was born in 1950 in Oldenburg. He studied biology and mathematics in Bielefeld and Bochum, went to Oxford University on a Heisenberg Scholarship and in 1987 became Professor of Zoology and Behavioural Ecology at University of Bern. From 1999 to 2018 he has been Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute of Limnology, which in 2007 became the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. He has been an Honorary professor at Kiel University since 2000.
Go to Profile#2019
Paul Brakefield
#56138
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Paul Martin Brakefield FRS is a British evolutionary biologist and Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Fellow of Trinity College and until 2019 was director of the Museum of Zoology. He previously held the Chair in Evolutionary Biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and was President of the Linnean Society of London from 2015 to 2018. He is best known for his research on butterfly eyespots.
Go to Profile#2020
Tetsuro Matsuzawa
#21629
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Tetsuro Matsuzawa is a primatologist who was a past director of the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University. He graduated from Kyoto University with a B.A. degree in 1974, a Psy.M. degree in 1976 and a Ph.D. degree in Science in 1989.
Go to Profile#2021
F. Gwendolen Rees
#32389
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Florence Gwendolen Rees, FRS was a Welsh zoologist and parasitologist. She was the first Welsh woman to become a fellow of the Royal Society. By the time she was 80 years old, she had published 68 papers.
Go to Profile#2022
J. Herbert Taylor
#51157
Overall Influence
1916 - 1998 (82 years)
James Herbert Taylor was an American molecular biologist and geneticist known for his research on chromosome structure and reproduction, which helped establish standards for the subsequent field of molecular genetics. He conducted much of this research with his wife, Shirley Taylor. According to a 2006 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory textbook, “Taylor comes as close as anyone to being the father of the field” of studying chromosomes.
Go to Profile#2023
Jörg Vogel
#38632
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jörg Vogel is a German scientist in the field of RNA biology and microbiology. He holds a position as full professor, chairs the Institute for Molecular Infection Biology at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and is a founding Helmholtz-Institute director. Vogel studied biochemistry at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Imperial College London. After his PhD work he performed postdoctoral research at the Uppsala University, Sweden and was an EMBO fellow at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel. From 2004 to 2009 he was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology.
Go to Profile#2024
Johann Peter Gogarten
#44957
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Johann Peter Gogarten is a German-American biologist studying the early evolution of life. Born in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, he studied plant physiology and membrane transport with Friedrich-Wilhelm Bentrup in Tübingen and Giessen. In 1987 he moved to the US as a postdoc to work with Lincoln Taiz at UC Santa Cruz. He currently is Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT.
Go to Profile#2025
Lars Svennerholm
#60156
Overall Influence
#2026
Eva Zažímalová
#60181
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Eva Zažímalová is a Czech biochemist and since March 2017 the president of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Since 2021, she has also been one of the European Commission's Chief Scientific Advisors.
Go to Profile#2027
Regine Kahmann
#33712
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Regine Kahmann is a German microbiologist and was Director at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg from 2000 to 2019. She was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2020.
Go to Profile#2028
Jan Born
#35334
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jan Born is a neuroscientist who researches the role of sleep in memory consolidation, problem solving, and brain plasticity. He is Head of the Institute of Medical Psychology and the Behavioral Neurobiology department at the University of Tübingen.
Go to Profile#2029
Gerald Westheimer
#48399
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Gerald Westheimer AM FRS is an Australian scientist at University of California, Berkeley researching the eye, its optics, and how we see details in space and in three dimensions. Life and career Westheimer was born on 13 May 1924 in Berlin into an observant Jewish family—long settled in Germany and traced back at least Joseph Aaron Westheimer who had been born in 1768 in Menzingen, Baden Westheimer is the younger of two sons. In 1938, state-sanctioned attacks against Jews in Nazi Germany prompted the family to emigrate to Australia, settling in Sydney.
Go to Profile#2030
Richard J. Ablin
#36520
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Richard J. Ablin is an American scientist, most notable for research on prostate cancer. According to the Wall Street Journal: Early years Ablin received a bachelor's degree from Lake Forest College in 1962 and a doctorate in microbiology from the University at Buffalo in 1967, where he received the distinguished alumni award in 2010.
Go to Profile#2031
Eugene F. Stoermer
#31721
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Eugene F. Stoermer was a leading researcher in diatoms, with a special emphasis on freshwater species of the North American Great Lakes. He was a professor of biology at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment.
Go to Profile#2032
Steven D. Tanksley
#44479
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Steven Dale Tanksley is the Chief Technology Officer of Nature Source Improved Plants. Prior to founding Nature Source Improved Plants, Tanksley served as the Liberty Hyde Bailey professor of plant breeding and biometry and chair of the Genomics Initiative Task Force at Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#2033
Pamela S. Soltis
#57506
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Pamela Soltis is an American botanist. She is a distinguished professor at the University of Florida, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, principal investigator of the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics and Evolutionary Genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and founding director of the University of Florida Biodiversity Institute.
Go to Profile#2034
Judith Campisi
#47015
Overall Influence
Judith Campisi is an American biochemist and cell biologist. She is a professor of biogerontology at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She is also a member of the SENS Research Foundation Advisory Board and an adviser at the Lifeboat Foundation. She is co-editor in chief of the Aging Journal, together with Mikhail Blagosklonny and David Sinclair, and founder of the pharmaceutical company Unity Biotechnology. She is listed in Who's Who in Gerontology. She is widely known for her research on how senescent cells influence aging and cancer — in particular the Senescence Associated Secreto...
Go to Profile#2035
Laura Ayres
#26242
Overall Influence
1922 - 1992 (70 years)
Laura Ayres was a virologist who was one of Portugal's pioneers in the fight against AIDS. Early training Laura Guilhermina Martins Ayres was born on 1 June 1922 in Loulé in the Faro District of Portugal. She graduated in Medicine in 1946. It was during her subsequent internships in hospitals that she became interested in the study of communicable diseases. After her hospital training, she did an internship between 1950 and 1953 in Lisbon at the Instituto Superior de Higiene , the former designation of the Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr. Ricardo Jorge . There she carried out studies on the in...
Go to Profile#2036
Willem Meijer
#43563
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Willem Meijer was a Dutch botanist and plant collector. Background and education Meijer was born in 1923 in The Hague, Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 1951. Meijer travelled to Java later that year and became the Assistant of the Herbarium Bogoriense .
Go to Profile#2037
Gisela Kaplan
#33765
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Gisela Kaplan is an Australian ethologist who primarily specialises in ornithology and primatology. She is a professor emeritus in animal behaviour at the University of New England, Australia, and also honorary professor of the Queensland Brain Institute.
Go to Profile#2038
Ahmad Teebi
#23608
Overall Influence
1949 - 2010 (61 years)
Ahmad Said Teebi was a Palestinian, born in Lebanon, clinical geneticist who studied and practiced in several countries, ending his career in Canada and the United States. Biography Teebi was born in Beirut, Lebanon, to a family of Palestinian origin. He received his primary education in Lebanon and in Kuwait. He obtained his medical degree from Cairo University , then studied Pediatrics in Kuwait. He studied at University College of Dublin in 1976–77, receiving a Diploma of Child Health in 1977. He began his medical residency at the Kuwait Medical Genetics Center , then completed it at the University of British Columbia , and in the United States at Yale University .
Go to Profile#2039
Bruce H. Thiers
#60478
Overall Influence
#2040
Meemann Chang
#31068
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Meemann Chang also known as Zhang Miman, is a Chinese paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology . She completed her undergraduate studies at Moscow University and completed her PhD thesis entitled 'The braincase of Youngolepis, a Lower Devonian crossopterygian from Yunnan, south-western China' at Stockholm University. She was the first woman to become head of IVPP in 1983. For her many career achievements, she received an honorary degree from the University of Chicago in 2011 and the Romer-Simpson Medal from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2016...
Go to Profile#2041
Simon Boulton
#45298
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Simon Joseph Boulton is a British scientist who has made important contributions to the understanding of DNA repair and the treatment of cancer resulting from DNA damage. He currently occupies the position of Senior Scientist and group leader of the DSB Repair Metabolism Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, London. He is also an honorary Professor at University College London.
Go to Profile#2042
Mark Purnell
#36303
Overall Influence
Mark Andrew Purnell is a British palaeontologist, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. Purnell is an expert in conodont biostratigraphy and conodont palaeobiology, focussing especially on attempts to uncover the function of conodont elements. Using conventional functional morphology, physical modelling and microwear analysis, Purnell uncovered unequivocal evidence that conodont elements had performed a mechanical tooth function in life, resolving a palaeobiological debate that had run for more than a century. His work has expanded in recent years to analysing feeding me...
Go to Profile#2043
I. Robert Lehman
#46112
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Israel Robert Lehman is a Lithuanian-born American biochemist who is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He made major contributions in characterizing the process of homologous recombination.
Go to Profile#2044
Karen Avraham
#25766
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Karen B. Avraham is an Israeli-American human geneticist and the first female Dean of the Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Medicine. Born in Canada in 1962, Avraham moved to the US at a young age. Her research focuses on the discovery and characterization of genes responsible for hereditary hearing loss.
Go to Profile#2045
Daniel A. Livingstone
#38077
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Daniel Archibald Livingstone was the James B Duke Professor Emeritus and research professor, in the Department of Biology at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Livingstone studied at McGill and Dalhousie Universities before joining Ed Deevey's research group as a PhD student at Yale University.
Go to Profile#2046
Siddhartha Roy
#33040
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Siddhartha Roy is an Indian structural biologist, biophysicist, former director of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology and the former director of Bose Institute. Widely known for his studies on bacteriophage lambda and protein synthesis, he is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. In 1999, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, for his contributions to Biological sciences.
Go to Profile#2047
Milton Packer
#60680
Overall Influence
#2048
Satoru Miyano
#47332
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
is a professor and the director of the M&D Data Science Center at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. He was awarded fellowship of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2013 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.
Go to Profile#2049
Joshua Sanes
#52318
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joshua R Sanes is an American neurobiologist who is known for his contributions to the understanding of synapse development. Throughout his career, Sanes has been the recipient of various awards and honors, including membership to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. His research involves an interdisciplinary approach which focuses mainly on the formation of synapses at the neuromuscular junction by combining the sciences of psychology, chemistry, biology, and engineering to study these circuits and employ molecular and genetic imaging to understand their function. Sanes currently lives in ...
Go to Profile#2050
Sharon R. Long
#22882
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Sharon Rugel Long is an American plant biologist. She is the Steere-Pfizer Professor of Biological Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, and the Principal Investigator of the Long Laboratory at Stanford.
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