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,

#2151

Daniel I. Axelrod

#46049
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Daniel Isaac Axelrod was an American paleoecologist specializing in Tertiary Cordilleran floras, in particular correlating fossil evidence of specific floras with climate change indicators. Biography He received his A.B. in botany, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in paleobotany from the University of California at Berkeley. He served in the United States Army during World War II performing strategic analysis of aerial photographs of terrane. After the war he was hired as an assistant professor of geology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He eventually became a full professor of both ge...
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#2152

David Latchman

#36281
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
David Seymour Latchman CBE is a British geneticist and university administrator. Since 2003 he has been Vice-Chancellor of Birkbeck, University of London, and since 1999 professor of genetics at University College London.
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#2153

Mikhail Fedonkin

Mikhail Fedonkin
#41214
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Academician Mikhail Aleksandrovich Fedonkin is a Russian paleontologist specializing in documentation of the earliest animals' body fossils, tracks, and trails. He has also described numerous Vendian-aged fossils including Hiemalora, Cephalonega, and Nimbia occlusa.
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#2154

Stanley Fields

#39369
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Stanley Fields is an American biologist best known for developing the yeast two hybrid method for identifying protein–protein interactions. He is currently a professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and serves as chair of the Department of Genome Sciences.
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#2155

Charles Epstein

#23098
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Charles Joseph Epstein was an American geneticist who was severely injured in 1993 when he became a victim of a mail bomb attack by the Unabomber. He was a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco and the Buck Institute for Age Research.
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#2156

Birgit Vennesland

#46637
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Birgit Vennesland was a Norwegian-American biochemist. Vennesland spent the majority of her career as an academic for the University of Chicago from 1941 to 1968. While at Chicago, she compared the enzymes that animals use during metabolism and to the enzymes used by plants in photosynthesis. After leaving Chicago for Germany, Vennesland was the director of the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology from 1968 to 1970. She later was the director of an eponymous research facility by the Max Planck Society from 1970 until her retirement in 1981. During her career, Vennesland received the Stephen ...
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#2157

Zdeněk Špinar

#52639
Overall Influence
1916 - 1995 (79 years)
Zdeněk Špinar was a Czechoslovak paleontologist and author. He was renowned in the field for popularising vertebrate paleontology. He specialised in the paleontology of amphibians, especially anurans. Many of his studies remain heavily cited. He is also known for a scientific collaboration with painter Zdeněk Burian.
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#2158

Jon E. Ahlquist

#57832
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Jon Edward Ahlquist was an American molecular biologist and ornithologist who has specialized in molecular phylogenetics. He has collaborated extensively with Charles Sibley, primarily at Yale University. By 1987, both Ahlquist and Sibley had left Yale. In 1988, Ahlquist and Sibley were awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal by the National Academy of Sciences. In January 1991 , Charles Sibley and Ahlquist published Phylogeny and Classification of Birds, which presented a new phylogeny for birds based on DNA-DNA hybridisation techniques, known as the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy. At that time, he was an associate professor of zoology at Ohio University.
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#2159

Roberto Malinow

#48193
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Roberto Malinow is an Argentinian-born American neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently a distinguished professor of neurobiology and neurosciences, and holds the Shiley Chair in Alzheimer's Disease Research at UCSD. In 2012 Dr. Malinow was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 2015 was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
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#2160

Sarah Otto

#43888
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sarah Perin "Sally" Otto is a theoretical biologist, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Experimental Evolution, and is currently a Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. From 2008-2016, she was the director of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Otto was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2015 the American Society of Naturalists gave her the Sewall Wright Award for fundamental contributions to the unification of biology. In 2021, she was awarded the Darwin-Wallace Medal for contributing major advances to the mathematical theory of ev...
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#2161

Charles Clarke

#47125
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dr. Charles M. Clarke is an ecologist and botanist specialising in the carnivorous plant genus Nepenthes, for which he is regarded as a world authority. Clarke has an honours degree in Botany from Monash University in Melbourne, and a Ph.D. in Ecosystem management at the University of New England, in Armidale, New South Wales.
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#2162

Hannah Monyer

#28865
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Hannah Monyer is a Romanian-born German neurobiologist and, since 1999, she has been Director of the Department of Clinical Neurology at the University Hospital in Heidelberg. In 2004 she was awarded the 1.55 million euro Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. She received the Philip Morris Research Prize—described by Bio-pro as "one of the most prestigious science awards in Germany"—in 2006. In 2010, the European Research Council awarded her a total of 1.87 million euros for her research.
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#2163

Michael Kasha

#14064
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Michael Kasha was an American physical chemist and molecular spectroscopist who was one of the original founders of the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University . Education and early work Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a family of Ukrainian immigrants, Kasha studied chemical engineering at night at the Cooper Union in New York City for two years while working full-time during the days at the Merck & Co. research facility in New Jersey. He then received a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he completed a bachelor's degree in chemistry. He earned his Ph.D.
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#2164

Fuller W. Bazer

#54503
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Fuller W. Bazer is an American animal scientist and a Regents Fellow, Distinguished Professor, and O.D. Butler Chair in Animal Science at Texas A&M University. Birth and education Fuller W. Bazer was born in 1938 in Shreveport, Louisiana. He graduated from C.E. Byrd High School in Shreveport, LA, in 1956 and was inducted into the Byrd Alumni Hall of Fame in 2002. He received his BS in Biology from Centenary College in Shreveport, LA; and his Masters at Louisiana State University. He completed his Ph.D. in animal science from North Carolina State University. He was a graduate research profess...
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#2165

Ruth Ella Moore

Ruth Ella Moore
#33550
Overall Influence
1903 - 1994 (91 years)
Ruth Ella Moore was an American bacteriologist and microbiologist, who, in 1933, became the first African-American woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in a natural science. She was a professor of bacteriology at Howard University. A decade later, she was installed as the head of the department of bacteriology, which she renamed to the department of microbiology. During that period she was promoted to associate professor of microbiology.
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#2166

Patricia J. Kailola

#48286
Overall Influence
Patricia J. Kailola is a noted ichthyologist. Her primary focus is in tropical Indo-Pacific fishes. She is an Australian Museum Research Associate. Among her numerous publications are listed several books covering tropical fish. She also has written texts on catfish. As of April 2006, she was working on a textbook on Western Indian Ocean fishes. She has assisted the Australian Museum in confirmation of species identification among their collection. Worldcat.org lists 27 works in 57 publications in 1 language and 603 library holdings.
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#2167

Hans Thoenen

#62943
Overall Influence
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#2168

Herbert Needleman

#11145
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Herbert Leroy Needleman researched the neurodevelopmental damage caused by lead poisoning. He was a pediatrician, child psychiatrist, researcher and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, and the founder of the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning . Dr. Needleman played a key role in securing some of the most significant environmental health protections achieved during the 20th century, which resulted in a fivefold reduction in the prevalence of lead poisoning among children in the United States by the early 1990s. Despite engendering st...
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#2169

Barry Dickson

Barry Dickson
#51195
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Barry J. Dickson is an Australian neurobiologist who studies the development of neuronal networks in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Dickson is a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia and a former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria.
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#2170

Robert Stickgold

#27702
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Stickgold is a full professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A sleep researcher, his work focuses on the relationship between sleep and learning. His articles in the popular press are intended to illustrate the dangers of sleep deprivation.
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#2171

Jonathan Hodgkin

#48131
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jonathan Alan Hodgkin is a British biochemist, Professor of Genetics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Keble College, Oxford. Education Hodgkin was educated at the University of Oxford where he graduated in 1971. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1974 for research on the genetics of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
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#2172

Gerald A. Kerkut

#54778
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Gerald Allan Kerkut was a British zoologist and physiologist. Career He attended the University of Cambridge from 1945 to 1952 and earned a doctorate in zoology. He went on to establish the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry at University of Southampton where he remained throughout his career. He became Professor of Physiology and Biochemistry in 1966 and went on to become the Dean of Science, Chairman of the School of Biochemical and Physiological Sciences and Head of the Department of Neurophysiology.
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#2173

Lindsay Zanno

#33290
Overall Influence
Lindsay E. Zanno is an American vertebrate paleontologist and a leading expert on theropod dinosaurs and Cretaceous paleoecosystems. She is the Head of Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University.
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#2174

Alicia Lourteig

Alicia Lourteig
#31292
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Alicia Lourteig was an Argentine and French botanist, world specialist in Oxalidaceae. Personal life and education Alicia Lourteig was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her parents originated from France and Argentina. She studied pharmacy and biochemistry at university in Buenos Aires, and her doctorate was awarded in 1946.
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#2175

Nam-Hai Chua

#54926
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nam-Hai Chua FRS is a Singaporean botanist. He is an Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor at Rockefeller University. He is now deputy chairman of Temasek Life Science Laboratory. Life He earned a BS from the National University of Singapore, and an AM and PhD from Harvard University in 1969. He taught at the University of Singapore Medical School, from 1969 to 1971. He was awarded the International Prize for Biology in 2005. He joined Rockefeller University in 1973 and remained there till his retirement from the university. Thereafter, he moved back to Singapore in 2016.
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#2176

Jewel Plummer Cobb

Jewel Plummer Cobb
#18272
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Jewel Plummer Cobb was an American biologist, cancer researcher, professor, dean, and academic administrator. She contributed to the field of cancer research by studying the cure for melanoma. Cobb was an advocate for increasing the representation of women and students of color in universities, and she created programs to support students interested in pursuing graduate school.
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#2177

Jill Farrant

#61550
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jill Farrant, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, is a leading expert on resurrection plants, which 'come back to life' from a desiccated, seemingly dead state when they are rehydrated.
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#2178

John Ernest Overall

#63164
Overall Influence
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#2179

Stephen L. Brusatte

Stephen L. Brusatte
#33714
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Stephen Louis Brusatte is an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who specializes in the anatomy and evolution of dinosaurs. He was educated at the University of Chicago for his Bachelors degree, at the University of Bristol for his Master's of Science on a Marshall Scholarship, and finally at the Columbia University for Master's in Philosophy and Doctorate. He is currently a Reader in Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Edinburgh.
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#2180

William J. Sutherland

#45459
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
William James Sutherland is the Miriam Rothschild Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Cambridge. He has been the president of the British Ecological Society. He has been a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge since 2008.
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#2181

Itzhak Brook

#63229
Overall Influence
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#2182

Botond Roska

#38500
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Botond Roska is a Hungarian medical doctor and biomedical researcher. Much of his research is on the pathways of visual perception and how to treat diseases that cause blindness. Early life and education Botond Roska was born in 1969 in Budapest, Hungary. His mother was a musician and his father, , was a computer scientist. He learned to play the cello and studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music from 1985 to 1989. After a hand injury ended his cello career, he decided to study medicine and mathematics instead. He studied mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University from 1991 to 1995. He receiv...
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#2183

Alain Prochiantz

#37130
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alain Prochiantz is a neurobiology researcher and professor at the Collège de France, of which he became director from 2015 to 2019. Biography Alain Prochiantz is a former student of the École normale supérieure . After a science thesis obtained in 1976 in the field of genetic translation, he turned towards neurobiology by working with Jacques Glowinski and became a research fellow and then research director at the CNRS. He was appointed head of the Biology Department at the École normale supérieure, which he kept until 2006, when he became the holder of the "Morphogenetic Processes" chair...
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#2184

Sathees Chukkurumbal Raghavan

#48731
Overall Influence
Sathees C. Raghavan is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. He is from Kannur, Kerala. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for science and technology, the highest science award in India, for the year 2013 in the biological science category. He was awarded the prize for his research work on novel DNA repair inhibitors that can target cancer cells. He received his BSc in Zoology from Payyannur College, Payyannur, MSc in Zoology with Entomology Specialization from University Center, Calicut University, Calicut, and PhD in Zoology from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi India in 2000.
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#2185

Janet Treasure

Janet Treasure
#45019
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Janet Treasure , OBE PhD FRCP FRCPsych, is a British psychiatrist, who specialises in research and treatment of eating disorders. She is currently the Director of the Eating Disorder Unit and Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London. In early-2013, she was awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire for Services to People with Eating Disorders.
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#2186

Grover C. Stephens

Grover C. Stephens
#40845
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Grover Cleveland Stephens, Jr. , was an American marine biologist and comparative physiologist at the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Irvine. Early life, military service, and education Stephens was born 12 Jan 1925 in Oak Park, Illinois to Grover C. and Celene Madeleine Stephens, and grew up in Cicero, Illinois, attending J. Sterling Morton High School East. He entered military service on 13 Nov 1943 and trained at the Great Lakes Naval Station. After one year of engineering training at Purdue University and Princeton University, he was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S.
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#2187

Toshio Hirano

Toshio Hirano
#53906
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
is a Japanese immunologist and academic, best known for his discovery of interleukin-6. Since August 2011, he has served as the 17th President of Osaka University. Chronology 1972—graduated from Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University1980—assistant professor in the School of Medicine, Kumamoto University1984—assistant professor at Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Osaka University1989—professor at the same university2004—Dean of Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University2008—Dean of Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka UniversityAugust 2011—the 17th president of ...
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#2188

Francis Raymond Fosberg

#44123
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Francis Raymond Fosberg was an American botanist. A prolific collector and author, he played a significant role in the development of coral reef and island studies. History Ray Fosberg was born in Spokane, Washington but grew up in Turlock, California. He received a B.A. in Botany at Pomona College in 1930. Fosberg worked as a plant researcher at the Los Angeles County Museum, specializing in plants from islands on the coast of California and of the desert Southwest.
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#2189

Demetrios Spandidos

Demetrios Spandidos
#45311
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Demetrios A. Spandidos is a Greek virologist and cancer researcher. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Crete where he was professor of virology from 1989 till 2015. He is also the founder of Spandidos Publications and the editor-in-chief of all eight of its journals.
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#2190

Kenneth Mellanby

#13610
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Major Kenneth Mellanby was an English ecologist and entomologist. He received the OBE for his work on the scabies mite. Life and work lMellanby was educated at Barnard Castle School and then at King's College, Cambridge in Biology. He gained his PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on the ability of parasites to survive desiccation. He then worked as a Sorby Research Fellow of the Royal Society in Sheffield.
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#2191

Keith R. Thompson

#57804
Overall Influence
Keith Thompson was a professor at Dalhousie University with a joint appointment in the Department of Oceanography and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Thompson was trained in the UK and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool in 1979. His research interests focused on ocean and shelf circulation, 4D data assimilation, extremal analysis and applied time series analysis.
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#2192

David Hopwood

#30759
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Sir David Alan Hopwood is a British microbiologist and geneticist. Education Educated at Purbrook Park County High School and Lymm Grammar School, Hopwood gained his Bachelor of Arts degree from St John's College, Cambridge and his PhD from the University of Glasgow in 1973.
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#2193

Cedric Smith

#18360
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Cedric Austen Bardell Smith was a British statistician and geneticist. Smith was born in Leicester. He was the younger son of John Bardell Smith , a mechanical engineer, and Ada . He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys until 1929, when the family moved to London. His education continued at Bec School, Tooting, for three years, then at University College School, London. In 1935, although having failed his Higher School Certificate, he was awarded an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated in the Mathematical Tripos, with a First in Part II in 1937 and a Distinction in Part III in 1938.
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#2194

Jane Reece

#62910
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jane B. Reece is an American scientist and textbook author. Along with American biologist Neil Campbell, she wrote the widely used Campbell/Reece Biology textbooks. Reece received an A.B. in Biology from Harvard University, an M.S. in microbiology from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in bacteriology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral thesis was entitled 'The RecE pathway of genetic combination in Escherichia Coli'. Having completed her Ph.D., she stayed at UC Berkeley for a while as a postdoctoral researcher, before accepting tenure at Stanford University as a researcher.
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#2195

Viktor Hamburger

#63446
Overall Influence
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#2196

Niu Jingyi

#24806
Overall Influence
1920 - 1995 (75 years)
Niu Jingyi was a Chinese biochemist. He was born on December 26, 1920, in Xinghua, Jiangsu. In 1942, he graduated from the chemistry department of the National Southwestern Associated University. He served as an instructor of Tsinghua University from 1946 to 1948. In 1948, he went to United States to study biochemistry at the University of Texas, five years later commenced doctor degree. In 1956, he came back to China.
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#2197

Cèsar Milstein

#63534
Overall Influence
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#2198

Astrid Fagraeus

#49932
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Astrid Elsa Fagraeus-Wallbom, born May 30, 1913, in Stockholm, Sweden and died February 24, 1997, was a Swedish immunologist. Education and career Fagraeus received a PhD in medicine in 1948 from the Karolinska Institute. In 1949, she was appointed associate professor of bacteriology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. She became head of the virology department at the Swedish Bacteriological Laboratory in 1953. In 1961–1979 she served as the first professor of immunology in Sweden, at Karolinska Institutet.
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#2199

David Hillis

#31062
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David Mark Hillis is an American evolutionary biologist, and the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known for his studies of molecular evolution, phylogeny, and vertebrate systematics. He created the popular Hillis Plot depiction of the evolutionary tree of life.
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#2200

Gretchen Daily

Gretchen Daily
#30352
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Gretchen C. Daily is an American environmental scientist and tropical ecologist. She has contributed to understanding humanity's dependence and impacts on nature, and to advancing a systematic approach for valuing nature in policy, finance, management, and practice around the world. Daily is co-founder and faculty director of the Natural Capital Project, a global partnership that aims to mainstream the values of nature into decision-making of people, governments, investors, corporations, NGOs, and other institutions. Together with more than 300 partners worldwide, the Project is pioneering s...
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