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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School

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#2051

Ana Maria Cuervo

Ana Maria Cuervo

#47765

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Ana Maria Cuervo is a Spanish-American physician, researcher, and cell biologist. She is a professor in developmental and molecular miology, anatomy and structural biology, and medicine and co-director of the Institute for Aging Studies at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is best known for her research work on autophagy, the process by which cells recycle waste products, and its changes in aging and age-related diseases.

#2052

Darrel R. Falk

#29327

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Darrel R. Falk is an American biologist. He is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Point Loma Nazarene University and is the past president and a current senior advisor with BioLogos Foundation, an advocacy group that emphasizes compatibility between science and Christian faith.

#2053

Jorge Alcocer Varela

#17470

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Jorge Alcocer Varela is a Mexican immunologist, researcher, teacher and healthcare professional. Since 1 December 2018 he has served as the head of Secretariat of Health of Mexico, appointed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As a physician and emeritus researcher at the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition, Alcocer Varela has served Mexican public health in various capacities for more than 30 years.

#2054

Jim van Os

#25650

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Jim van Os is a Dutch academic and psychiatrist. He is Professor of Psychiatry and medical manager of the Brain Center at Utrecht University Medical Center, the Netherlands. Career Van Os studied medicine in Amsterdam, psychiatry in Jakarta, Casablanca, Bordeaux, and London, and subsequently epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

#2055

David B. Wake

#49053

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

David Burton Wake was an American herpetologist. He was professor of integrative biology and Director and curator of herpetology of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. Wake is known for his work on the biology and evolution of salamanders as well as general issues of vertebrate evolutionary biology. He has served as president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and American Society of Zoologists. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Linnean Society of London, the Ame...

#2056

Enrico Schleiff

#24302

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Enrico Schleiff is a German biologist and physicist, and the president of the Goethe University Frankfurt, serving since 1 January 2021. Career Early career Schleiff studied physics at the Charles University in Prague from 1990 to 1992 and at the University of Mainz from 1992 to 1995. He completed his master's thesis at the University of Basel in 1995 and then received a Ph.D. from the Department of Biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal. He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Kiel and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he completed his habilitat...

#2057

Richard Hobbs

#49597

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Richard J. Hobbs FAA, is a distinguished professor, ARC Australian Laureate Fellow and ecologist at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a Highly-Cited author who has written extensively in the areas of vegetation dynamics and management, ecosystem fragmentation, ecosystem rehabilitation and restoration, landscape ecology, and conservation biology. Current research focuses on managing ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.

#2058

Mark Denny

#57387

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Mark W. Denny is a professor of biology at Stanford University. His research on the intertidal zone of wave-swept shores has led to increased understanding of this habitat. His most publicized research is his work on locomotion of water striders, which led to the coining of the term "Denny's paradox" to explain a discrepancy between physics and previous understanding of how surface-dwelling animals such as these insects move.

#2059

Yakov Kuzyakov

#56456

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Yakov Kuzyakov is a soil scientist and ecologist, professor and one of the most frequently cited soil scientists worldwide. Research and career Kuzyakov graduated in 1986 from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Halle. He defended his PhD at the Russian State Agrarian University – Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in 1990 under the supervision of Alexey Fokin. Then he headed the radioisotopic laboratory from 1990 to 1993 over there. Later in 1993 Kuzyakov continued his research career at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops.

#2060

Tim Birkhead

#43615

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Timothy Robert Birkhead is a British ornithologist. He has been Professor of Behaviour and Evolution at the University of Sheffield since 1976. Education Birkhead was awarded a Bachelor's degree in Biology from Newcastle University in 1972, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy degree from University of Oxford in 1976 for research on the breeding biology and survival of guillemots Uria aalge supervised by E.K. Dunn and Chris Perrins. He was subsequently awarded a Doctor of Science from Newcastle in 1989.

#2061

Nizar Ibrahim

#25498

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Nizar Ibrahim is a German-Moroccan vertebrate paleontologist and comparative anatomist. He is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. Ibrahim has led several expeditions to Africa's Sahara and is notable for his research on fossil vertebrates from the Kem Kem Group, including pterosaurs, crocodyliforms, and dinosaurs. In recent years, research led by Ibrahim radically changed ideas about the morphology and life habits of one of the largest predatory dinosaurs, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Ibrahim also has interests in bioinformatics and contributed to the NSF-funded Phenoscape project.

#2062

Michael Stumpf

#41349

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Michael Stumpf is a scholar in the field of systems biology, in particular the inference of mathematical models using statistical inference and machine learning approaches. He has made ample contributions to network science, cell fate decision making processes and population genetics.

#2063

Alwin Max Pappenheimer Jr.

#56301

Overall Influence

1908 - 1995 (87 years)

Alwin Max Pappenheimer Jr. was an American biochemist and immunologist. Pappenheimer was noted for his advances in the field of bacterial toxins and in particular for isolation and analysis of the diphtheria toxin for which he received Eli Lilly Award in 1941. He performed ultracentrifugation-based analysis of diphtheria toxin-antitoxin interactions with Mary Locke Petermann and John Warren Williams at the University of Wisconsin.

#2064

James Underwood

#42925

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sir James Cresseé Elphinstone Underwood FMedSci is a British pathologist who was awarded a knighthood for services to medicine in the 2005 New Year honours list. Early life and education Underwood was born at Walsall in 1942, where his father, John Underwood, was a general practitioner. The family settled in Cheltenham in 1948. He was educated at Downside School, Somerset. From 1960-1965 he was a medical student at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, and a house doctor at St Stephen's Hospital, Chelsea.

#2065

Nicholas Barry Davies

#33851

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Nicholas Barry Davies FRS is a British field naturalist and zoologist, and Emeritus Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College.

#2066

Bruce A. Menge

#54123

Overall Influence

Bruce A. Menge is an American ocean ecologist. He has spent over forty years studying the processes that drive the dynamics of natural communities. His fields of interest include: structure and dynamics of marine meta-ecosystems, responses of coastal ecosystems to climate change, linking benthic and inner shelf pelagic communities, the relationship between scale and ecosystem dynamics, bottom-up and top-down control of community structure, recruitment dynamics, ecophysiology and sub-organismal mechanisms in environmental stress models, larval transport and connectivity, impact of ocean acidifi...

#2067

Harold E. Robinson

#51902

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Harold Ernest Robinson was an American botanist and entomologist. Career Robinson's specialty was the sunflower family and the bryophytes. He has named or described over 2,800 new species and subtribes, more than one tenth of the number of species in the Asteraceae. This figure is also about one quarter of the number of flowering plants described by Carl Linnaeus.

#2068

Knut Fægri

#33317

Overall Influence

1909 - 2001 (92 years)

Knut Fægri was a Norwegian botanist and palaeoecologist. Fægri was born in Bergen. He was the son of Major Ole A. Fægri and Gudrun Stoltz and the nephew of the botanist, natural scientist, and politician Jørgen Brunchorst .

#2069

Judith Kimble

#54844

Overall Influence

Judith Kimble is a Henry Vilas Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Medical Genetics and Cell and Regenerative Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . Kimble’s research focuses on the molecular regulation of animal development.

#2070

Wallace Arthur

#49444

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Wallace Arthur is an evolutionary biologist and science writer. He is Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of Galway. His most recent book is Understanding Life in the Universe, published by Cambridge University Press, which focuses on the likely extent and nature of extraterrestrial life. He was one of the founding editors of the journal Evolution & Development, serving as an editor for nearly 20 years. He has held visiting positions at Harvard University, Darwin College Cambridge, and the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland.

#2071

Horst Mittelstaedt

#38273

Overall Influence

1923 - 2016 (93 years)

Horst Mittelstaedt was a German biologist and cybernetician. Together with Erich von Holst he demonstrated the "Reafference Principle" in 1950 concerning how an organism is able to separate reafferent sensory stimuli from exafferent sensory stimuli. This concept largely dealt with interactive processes between the central nervous system and its periphery.

#2072

Olivier Voinnet

#43204

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Olivier Voinnet is a French biologist and professor of RNA biology at the ETH Zurich. Voinnet obtained his PhD in 2001 in England in the group of David Baulcombe and later obtained a position as an independent group leader at the CNRS in Strasbourg where he was promoted to Directeur de Recherche in 2005. In 2010, he moved to ETH Zurich where he was appointed a full professor of RNA Biology. Voinnet's published articles have been subject to allegations of image manipulation, leading to multiple corrections and retractions: as of 2022 nine of Voinnet's scientific articles have been retracted, ...

#2073

Quentin D. Wheeler

Quentin D. Wheeler

#45280

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Quentin Duane Wheeler is an American entomologist, taxonomist, author and newspaper columnist, and is the founding director of the International Institute for Species Exploration. He was the fourth President of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse, New York until his retirement. Other positions have included: professor of entomology at Cornell University and Arizona State University; Keeper and Head of Entomology at the Natural History Museum in London; and Director of the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundati...

#2074

Charles Herbert Lowe

#50439

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

Charles Herbert Lowe, Jr. was an American biologist and herpetologist. Lowe was born in Los Angeles, California. After college he served during World War II as a U.S. Navy Ensign in the Pacific. In 1946, he enrolled at UCLA, where he received a Ph.D. in 1950. He then went to the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, where he became a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

#2075

Jacqueline McGlade

Jacqueline McGlade

#29259

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jacqueline Myriam McGlade is a British-born Canadian marine biologist and environmental informatics professor. Her research concerns the spatial and nonlinear dynamics of ecosystems, climate change and scenario development. She is currently professor of resilience and sustainable development at the University College London Institute for Global Prosperity and Faculty of Engineering, UK, and professor at Strathmore University in the Institute for Public Policy and Governance, Kenya.

#2076

Lawrence A. Tabak

#21395

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Lawrence A. Tabak is an American dentist and biomedical scientist serving as the principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health. He served as acting director from 2021 to 2023. Previously he was the director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research from 2000 to 2010.

#2077

Michael J. Wade

Michael J. Wade

#46975

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Michael J. Wade is a professor of biology at Indiana University Bloomington. Since 2009 he has been the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs at Indiana University. He is also affiliated faculty in the following departments and centers at Indiana University: Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior , the Cognitive Science Program , and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

#2078

Jerrold M. Olefsky

#61351

Overall Influence

#2079

Lars Arendt-Nielsen

#59164

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Lars Arendt-Nielsen is a professor at Aalborg University specialising in translational pain research and bio-markers. Lars Arendt-Nielsen's research is highly recognised internationally, and in addition to his university work he has established several businesses.

#2080

Alison Woollard

#47823

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Alison Woollard is a British biologist. She is a lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford where she is also a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. Early life Woollard was born in 1968 in Kingston-upon-Thames.

#2081

Walter R. Tschinkel

Walter R. Tschinkel

#41591

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Walter R. Tschinkel is an American myrmecologist, entomologist and Distinguished Research Professor of Biological Science and R.O. Lawton Distinguished Professor emeritus at Florida State University. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book The Fire Ants , the book Ant Architecture: The Wonder, Beauty, and Science of Underground Nests , and more than 150 original research papers on the natural history, ecology, nest architecture and organization of ant societies; chemical communication in beetles; and the mysterious fairy circles of the Namib desert. His casts of ant nests and bot...

#2082

Norman Giles

#59847

Overall Influence

1915 - 2006 (91 years)

Norman Henry Giles was an American microbial geneticist who studied mutations of Neurospora crassa. Norman H. Giles was a pioneer in genetics research. He was a member of the Botany Department at Yale University starting as an Instructor in Botany and rising to Professor of Biology . He then became Professor of Genetics . In 1972 Giles accepted a professorship at the University of Georgia where he established an active program in genetics that in 1980 became the Department of Genetics. He retired in 1986. Giles made important scientific contributions in the areas of intragenic complementation, gene conversion and analysis of gene clusters.

#2083

Garry Nolan

#41964

Overall Influence

Garry P. Nolan is an American immunologist, academic, inventor, and business executive. He holds the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Nolan founded biotechnology companies, wrote numerous medical research papers, and has been active in ufology.

#2084

James Barber

#36384

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

James Barber was a British senior research investigator and emeritus Ernst Chain professor of biochemistry at Imperial College London, Visiting Professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin and Visiting Canon Professor to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

#2085

Norman Davidson

#37250

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Norman Ralph Davidson was an American molecular biologist notable for advancing genome research, member of the National Academy of Sciences, received a National Medal of Science from U.S. President Bill Clinton, was a professor at Caltech. The New York Times called Davidson "major figure in advancing genome research ... whose groundbreaking work in molecular biology led to the earliest understanding of the overall structure of genomes". The Los Angeles Times called him "a groundbreaking Caltech chemical biologist". President Bill Clinton cited the scientist for "breakthroughs in chemistry a...

#2086

Jeffrey D. Palmer

#49939

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jeffrey Donald Palmer is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Indiana University Bloomington. Education Palmer was educated at Swarthmore College and completed his PhD at Stanford University on the evolution of chloroplast DNA supervised by Winslow Briggs in 1982.

#2087

Roger J. Davis

#61486

Overall Influence

#2088

Donald Zilversmit

#46377

Overall Influence

1919 - 2010 (91 years)

Donald Berthold Zilversmit was a Dutch-born U.S. nutritional biochemist, researcher and educator. He spent much of his career at Cornell University as professor in the division of nutritional sciences.

#2089

Colleen Cavanaugh

Colleen Cavanaugh

#57160

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Colleen Marie Cavanaugh is an American academic microbiologist best known for her studies of hydrothermal vent ecosystems. As of 2002, she is the Edward C. Jeffrey Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and is affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Cavanaugh was the first to propose that the deep-sea giant tube worm, Riftia pachyptila, obtains its food from bacteria living within its cells, an insight which she had as a graduate student at Harvard. Significantly, she made the co...

#2090

Stephen O'Rahilly

Stephen O'Rahilly

#41746

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sir Stephen Patrick O'Rahilly is an Irish-British physician and scientist known for his research into the molecular pathogenesis of human obesity, insulin resistance and related metabolic and endocrine disorders.

#2091

Pamela J. Bjorkman

Pamela J. Bjorkman

#42310

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Pamela Jane Bjorkman NAS, AAAS is an American biochemist. She is the David Baltimore Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology , Her research centers on the study of the three-dimensional structures of proteins related to Class I MHC, or Major Histocompatibility Complex, proteins of the immune system and proteins involved in the immune responses to viruses . Bjorkman is most well known as a pioneer in the field of structural biology.

#2092

John L. Harper

#43179

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

John Lander Harper was a British biologist, specializing in ecology and plant population biology. Life He was born in 1925 and educated at Lawrence Sheriff School, Rugby. He obtained his degree in Botany in and his MA and DPhil from Oxford with his doctoral thesis An investigation of the interaction of soil micro-organisms with special reference to the study of the bacterial population of plant root systems. Dr Harper spent a further nine years conducting research at the Department of Agriculture, Oxford, and a sabbatical as Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the University of California, ...

#2093

Cecilia Lo

#37311

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Cecilia Wen-ya Lo is a professor and the F. Sargent Cheever Chair of Developmental Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the study of congenital heart defects. Education Lo received her bachelor's degree in biology in 1974 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked with David Baltimore. She received her Ph.D. in 1979 from Rockefeller University.

#2094

John Anderson

#52048

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

John Russell Anderson was a Scottish pathologist, Professor of Pathology at the Western Infirmary, University of Glasgow, 1967–1983. Colleagues knew him as JRA. Life Anderson was born in Middlesbrough on 31 May 1918, the son of a Glasgow-trained GP. He won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of St Andrews. He 1939 he graduated with a BSc in Anatomy, and MB in 1942.

#2095

Gagandeep Kang

#15534

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Gagandeep Kang FRS is an Indian microbiologist and virologist who is the Professor in the Department of Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College, Vellore, India and from August 2016 to July 2020 was executive director of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, Faridabad, an autonomous institute of the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. Her major research focus is on viral infections in children, and the testing of rotaviral vaccines. She also works on other enteric infections and their consequences when children are infected in early life, sanitation and water safety.

#2096

Barbara Sahakian

#26557

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, is professor of clinical neuropsychology at the department of psychiatry and Medical Research Council /Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge. She is also an honorary clinical psychologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge. She has an international reputation in the fields of cognitive psychopharmacology, neuroethics, neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging.

#2097

Lynne E. Maquat

Lynne E. Maquat

#45215

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Lynne Elizabeth Maquat is an American biochemist and molecular biologist whose research focuses on the cellular mechanisms of human disease. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. She currently holds the J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, pediatrics and of oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Professor Maquat is also Founding Director of the Center for RNA Biology and Founding Chair of Graduate Women in Science at the Universi...

#2098

Robert R. Wagner

#55793

Overall Influence

1923 - 2001 (78 years)

Robert R. Wagner was an American virologist who spent time on the faculty at Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and finally the University of Virginia School of Medicine, from which he retired as professor emeritus in 1994. His research focused on the vesicular stomatitis virus. Wagner died of cancer in 2001.

#2099

Mauricio Tohen

#4779

Overall Influence

Mauricio Tohen is a Mexican American research psychiatrist, Distinguished Professor, and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of New Mexico. Tohen's research has focused on the epidemiology, outcome, and treatment of bipolar and psychotic disorders, and is especially known for innovating the design of clinical trials and the criteria to determine outcome in such diseases. Tohen has edited several books on his specialties. His social awareness has been noted in the promotion of programs to improve mental health care in areas such as substance abuse, b...

#2100

Sidney Pestka

#23872

Overall Influence

1936 - 2016 (80 years)

Sidney Pestka was an American biochemist and geneticist. A recipient of the National Medal of Technology, he is sometimes referred to as the "father of interferon" for his groundbreaking work developing the interferons as treatments for major diseases such as hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, and cancer. Pestka was part of the team working on research involving the genetic code, protein synthesis and ribosome function that led to the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine received by Marshall Warren Nirenberg.

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