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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#2201
William A. Haseltine
#42510
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
William A. Haseltine is an American scientist, businessman, author, and philanthropist. He is known for his groundbreaking work on HIV/AIDS and the human genome. Haseltine was a professor at Harvard Medical School, where he founded two research departments on cancer and HIV/AIDS. He is a founder of several biotechnology companies, including Cambridge Biosciences, The Virus Research Institute, ProScript, LeukoSite, Dendreon, Diversa, X-VAX, and Demetrix. He was a founder chairman and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, a company that pioneered the application of genomics to drug discovery.
Go to Profile#2202
Giuseppe Attardi
#34726
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Giuseppe Attardi was an American molecular biologist of Italian origin, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He made pioneering studies on the human mitochondrial structure and function.
Go to Profile#2203
Masaharu Kawakatsu
#38281
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Masaharu Kawakatsu is a Japanese zoologist known for his studies on the taxonomy and ecology of planarians. Life Masaharu Kawakatsu was born in 1929 in the Asahi village, Kameoka town, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, son of Masakazu Kawakatsu, a squire of the village, and Tei Kawakatsu , the daughter of a country medical doctor, Ei'ichi Okajima.
Go to Profile#2204
Christopher D. M. Fletcher
#63663
Overall Influence
#2205
Nathan. Sharon
#63695
Overall Influence
#2206
Christine Guthrie
#55776
Overall Influence
Christine Guthrie was an American yeast geneticist and American Cancer Society Research Professor of Genetics at University of California San Francisco. She showed that yeast have small nuclear RNAs involved in splicing pre-messenger RNA into messenger RNA in eukaryotic cells. Guthrie cloned and sequenced the genes for yeast snRNA and established the role of base pairing between the snRNAs and their target sequences at each step in the removal of an intron. She also identified proteins that formed part of the spliceosome complex with the snRNAs. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences i...
Go to Profile#2207
Arne Holmgren
#53249
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Arne Holmgren was a Swedish biochemist known as a redox pioneer. He studied medicine at Uppsala University in 1962 and became a medical student. He received his Ph.D. in 1968 from the Karolinska Institute where he became associate professor in 1969, and became a certified doctor in 1974.
Go to Profile#2208
Alan J. Cooper
#55643
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alan Cooper is a New Zealand evolutionary biologist and an ancient DNA researcher. He was involved in several important early ancient DNA studies, such as the first sequencing of moa genomes. He was the inaugural director of both the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre at the University of Oxford from 2001–2005, and the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, South Australia from 2005–2019.
Go to Profile#2209
Alastair Fitter
#49920
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alastair Hugh Fitter CBE FRS is a British ecologist at the University of York. Fitter was educated at Oxford and at Liverpool, and came to the Department of Biology in York in 1972. In 2004 he was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor, with the Research portfolio. He is a member of Council of the Natural Environment Research Council.
Go to Profile#2210
Magdalena Götz
#29583
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Magdalena Götz is a German neuroscientist. She is noted for her study of glial cells and holds a chair at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich's Department of Physiology. She is involved in the field of adult neurogenesis. Götz discovered that glial cells are neural stem cells in the developing mammalian brain. Current investigations study the mechanisms involved in determining how adult neural stem cells are specified. Götz current work focuses on refining ways to reprogram glial cells into neurons in organisms with traumatic brain injury. The German Stem Cell Network published an intervi...
Go to Profile#2211
Ali Khademhosseini
#22956
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ali Khademhosseini is the CEO of the Terasaki Institute, non-profit research organization in Los Angeles, and Omeat Inc., a cultivated-meat startup. Before taking his current CEO roles, he spent one year at Amazon Inc. Prior to that he was the Levi Knight chair and professor at the University of California-Los Angeles where he held a multi-departmental professorship in Bioengineering, Radiology, Chemical, and Biomolecular Engineering as well as the Director of Center for Minimally Invasive Therapeutics . From 2005 to 2017, he was a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the Wyss Institute...
Go to Profile#2212
Jukka Jernvall
#63621
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jukka Jernvall is a Finnish evolutionary biologist in the field of evo-devo research. His research has centered on the interplay of ecology, evolution and developmental biology, especially of the mammalian dentition. Jernvall is currently an Academy Professor at the Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki.
Go to Profile#2213
Caroline Dean
#42370
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Dame Caroline Dean is a British plant scientist working at the John Innes Centre. She is focused on understanding the molecular controls used by plants to seasonally judge when to flower. She is specifically interested in vernalisation — the acceleration of flowering in plants by exposure to periods of prolonged cold. She has also been on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2018.
Go to Profile#2214
Egon Diczfalusy
#63852
Overall Influence
#2215
Eric Poehlman
#43864
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Eric T. Poehlman , is an American scientist, formerly researching in the field of human obesity and aging. In 2000, Poehlman was investigated for scientific misconduct; the case continued for several years and in 2005, he admitted to fraudulent research practices. He had published research using falsified and fabricated data in studies on aging metabolism and obesity, including purporting to show beneficial effects on lipid profiles and abdominal fat in menopausal women being treated with hormone therapy. Poehlman became the first academic in the United States to be jailed for falsifying data ...
Go to Profile#2216
Dominick P. Purpura
#50477
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Dominick P. Purpura was a neuroscientist. who was well known for his research focused on intellectual disability. His work also focused on the origin of brain waves, developmental neurobiology, and epilepsy. From 1982 to 1983, Purpura was appointed as the president of the Society for Neuroscience. In 1984, he was recruited to be the dean of Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. He served as the dean for a total of 22 years.
Go to Profile#2217
J. Roger Bray
#62383
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
John Roger Bray was an American-born ecologist known for his collaboration with John Thomas Curtis. The Bray–Curtis dissimilarity is jointly named after them. Bray was born in 1929 to Roger H. Bray, who developed the Bray soil test. A native of Belleville, Illinois, the younger Bray was raised in Urbana, Illinois. Bray completed his bachelor's degree in botany at the University of Illinois in 1950, after three years of study. Bray began working toward a doctorate under John Thomas Curtis at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in August 1950. In 1955, Bray began teaching ecology at the University of Minnesota while working with Don Lawrence.
Go to Profile#2218
Matt Kaeberlein
#45855
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Matt Kaeberlein is an American biologist and biogerontologist best known for his research on evolutionarily conserved mechanisms of aging. He is currently a professor of pathology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Go to Profile#2219
Francisco Bolívar Zapata
#36524
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Francisco Gonzalo Bolívar Zapata is a Mexican biochemist and professor. After getting his PhD in biochemistry by the National Autonomous University of Mexico , he joined the Research Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in the same university, undertaking studies on Molecular Biology and Biotechnology and becoming one of the most important researchers working in the development of techniques for the use and characterization of the cell genetic material.
Go to Profile#2220
Carroll Williams
#57106
Overall Influence
1916 - 1991 (75 years)
Carroll Milton Williams was an American zoologist known for his work in entomology and developmental biology—in particular, metamorphosis in insects, for which he won the George Ledlie Prize. He performed groundbreaking surgical experiments on larvae and pupae, and developed multiple new techniques, including the use of carbon dioxide as an anesthetic. His impact on entomology has been compared to that of Vincent Wigglesworth.
Go to Profile#2221
M. C. Chang
#63951
Overall Influence
#2222
Michael Vecchione
#61760
Overall Influence
Michael Vecchione is an American zoologist currently at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2001. His highest cited paper is Common and scientific names of aquatic invertebrates from the United States and Canada: Mollusks at 661 times, according to Google Scholar. His current interests are marine biodiversity and cephalopods.
Go to Profile#2223
Catherine Forster
#45043
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Catherine Ann Forster is an American paleontologist, taxonomist and expert in ornithopod evolution and Triceratops taxonomy. She is a Professor in the Geological Sciences Program and the Department of Biological Sciences at George Washington University. She obtained a B.A. and B.S. from the University of Minnesota in 1982, followed by an M.Sc. in 1985 and a Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Pennsylvania. She then completed post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago between 1990 and 1994 in their department of Organismal Biology. She is known in part for unique bird fossils she and her ...
Go to Profile#2224
Hwang Woo-suk
#14796
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Hwang Woo-suk is a South Korean veterinarian and researcher. He was a professor of theriogenology and biotechnology at Seoul National University until he was dismissed on March 20, 2006. He was considered a pioneering expert in stem cell research and even called the "Pride of Korea". However, he became infamous around November 2005 for fabricating a series of stem cell experiments that were published in high-profile journals, the case known as the Hwang affair.
Go to Profile#2225
Bernard Fisher
#20423
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
Bernard Fisher was an American surgeon and a pioneer in the biology and treatment of breast cancer. He was a native of Pittsburgh. He was Chairman of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast Project at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. His work established definitively that early-stage breast cancer could be more effectively treated by lumpectomy, in combination with radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and/or hormonal therapy, than by radical mastectomy.
Go to Profile#2226
Gary Lynch
#61195
Overall Influence
Gary Lynch is a neuroscientist at UC-Irvine. His lab studies memory. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1968; his PhD advisor was Bryon Campbell. At UCI, his lab began research involving the role of long-term potentiation in memory. His biography is profiled in the book 101 Theory Drive.
Go to Profile#2227
Nicole C. Karafyllis
#20012
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Nicole C. Karafyllis is a German philosopher and biologist. As of 2010, she has been a Professor of Philosophy at the TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig/Brunswick Institute of Technology . Biography Nicole Christine Karafyllis was born in Germany to a German mother and a Greek father. From 1989 to 1994, she studied biology at the Universities of Erlangen and Tübingen. She was awarded her doctorate in biology from the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tübingen in 1999. Her Habilitation in philosophy was completed at the University of Stuttgart in 2006, dealing with the topic Phenomenology of Growth.
Go to Profile#2228
Philip James DeVries
#25265
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Philip James DeVries is a tropical biologist whose research focuses on insect ecology and evolution, especially butterflies. His best-known work includes symbioses between caterpillars, ants and plants, and community level biodiversity of rainforest butterflies.
Go to Profile#2229
John Acorn
#58288
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
John Acorn is a Canadian naturalist. He is a lecturer at the University of Alberta, a research associate at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, and a research associate at the E.H. Strickland Entomology Museum. He is also a local Edmonton celebrity, combining folk music with educational lyrics about the natural world.
Go to Profile#2230
Curtis Huttenhower
#38455
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Curtis Huttenhower is a Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harvard University. Education Huttenhower gained his BS from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2000, where he majored in computer science, chemistry and mathematics. He then spent two years as a software developer for Microsoft, working on the Microsoft Natural Language Development Platform. Huttenhower gained his MS in computational linguistics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003, where he studied with Dannie Durand and Eric Nyberg. In 2003, H...
Go to Profile#2231
Alexander Markham
#21741
Overall Influence
Sir Alexander Fred Markham, born 1950, is Professor of Medicine at the University of Leeds, Director of the Molecular Medicine Institute at St James's University Hospital, and a former Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK.
Go to Profile#2232
Hagop S. Akiskal
#23811
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Hagop Souren Akiskal was a Lebanese-born American psychiatrist and professor, of Armenian descent. He is best known for his research on temperament and bipolar disorder , revolutionizing the field of clinical psychiatry.
Go to Profile#2233
Bruce R. Korf
#44771
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bruce Richard Korf is a medical geneticist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In April 2009, he began a two-year term as president of the American College of Medical Genetics , a professional organization.
Go to Profile#2234
Thomas Bruice
#50652
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Thomas C. Bruice was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at University of California, Santa Barbara. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974. He was a pioneering researcher in the area of chemical biology, and is one of the 50 most cited chemists.
Go to Profile#2235
Steve Van Dyck
#52091
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Steve Van Dyck is the Senior Curator of vertebrates at Queensland Museum, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Steve Van Dyck was instrumental in the rediscovery of the endangered mahogany glider in 1989.
Go to Profile#2236
William Bradshaw Amos
#48556
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
William Bradshaw Amos is a British biologist, Emeritus Scientist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology . He led a team that developed the mesolens, a microscope with a giant lens.
Go to Profile#2237
Walter F. Lever
#64158
Overall Influence
#2238
Moustapha Kassem
#55752
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Moustapha Kassem is a scientist, physician and endocrinologist based in Denmark. He received his medical degree from Kasr-el-Aini Medical School, Cairo University, Egypt and received his post-graduate training in internal medicine and endocrinology in Denmark and the United States. He obtained his PhD degree and DSc degrees from Aarhus University.
Go to Profile#2239
Sunetra Gupta
#12969
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Sunetra Gupta is an Indian-born British infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. She has performed research on the transmission dynamics of various infectious diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19, and has received the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of the Royal Society. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of Collateral Global, an organisation which examines the global impact of COVID-19 restrictions.
Go to Profile#2240
Nalini Nadkarni
#27252
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Nalini Nadkarni is an American forest ecologist who pioneered the study of Costa Rican rain forest canopies. Using mountain climbing equipment to make her ascent, Nadkarni first took an inventory of the canopy in 1981, followed by two more inventories in 1984. She is also known with a characteristic nickname, «the queen of the forest canopy».
Go to Profile#2241
Christian Körner
#61592
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Christian Körner is an Austrian–Swiss botanist and emeritus professor at the University of Basel. He is one of the world's most renowned scientists in the field of alpine plant ecology. Life Körner was born in Salzburg. Between 1968 and 1973, he studied biology and geosciences at the University of Innsbruck. He completed his PhD on water relations of alpine plants in 1977 at the University of Innsbruck . From 1977 to 1980, he did a Postdoc in the Austrian MAB alpine program and field work in the Caucasus , followed by research stays at the Australian National University, Canberra. From 1982 to 1989, Körner was senior lecturer at the University of Innsbruck .
Go to Profile#2242
Thomas J. Hudson
#46740
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Thomas James Hudson, O.C., is a Canadian genome scientist noted for his leading role in the generation of physical maps of the human and mouse genomes and also his role in the International HapMap Project whose goal is to develop a haplotype map of the human genome.
Go to Profile#2243
H. E. Carter
#28484
Overall Influence
1910 - 2007 (97 years)
Herbert Edmund Carter was an American biochemist and educator. He grew up in central Indiana and received his bachelor's degree from DePauw University. He received a Ph.D. in 1934 in organic chemistry from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#2244
Richard L. Doty
#40589
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard L. Doty is a professor of psychology and otorhinolaryngology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been the director of the University of Pennsylvania's Smell and Taste Center since 1980.
Go to Profile#2245
Khem Shahani
#29373
Overall Influence
1923 - 2001 (78 years)
Khem Shahani was an Indian microbiologist who conducted pioneer research on probiotics . Career Khem Shahani is best known for his discovery of the DDS-1 strain of Lactobacillus acidophilus in 1959, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. One of his many contributions to biology in the years to come, in this landmark discovery, Shahani observed the high level of stability and nutritional viability of the DDS-1 strain. This unique feature meant that the probiotics were able to pass through the stomach acid and implant in the intestine where it could multiply over 200-fold. Shahani would later n...
Go to Profile#2246
Yong Poovorawan
#22123
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Yong Poovorawan is a professor of pediatrics at the Faculty of Medicine of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He is known for research in the fields of pediatric hepatology, viral hepatitis and virology, and avian influenza.
Go to Profile#2247
Alexander F. Schier
#55472
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Alexander F. Schier is a Professor of Cell Biology and the Director of the Biozentrum University of Basel, Switzerland. Schier received a B.A. in cell biology in 1988 from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland, followed by a PhD in cell biology in 1992 under Walter J. Gehring, also from the University of Basel, Switzerland. He conducted his postdoctoral research in Wolfgang Driever's lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University in Boston, US. In 1996, Schier was recruited as assistant professor in the Developmental Genetics Program to the Skirball Institut...
Go to Profile#2248
Peter D. Kramer
#11718
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter D. Kramer is an American psychiatrist and faculty member of Brown Medical School specializing in the area of clinical depression. Early life Peter D. Kramer was born on October 22, 1948, in New York City to Jewish Holocaust survivors. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1970 and an MD in 1976. He was a Marshall Scholar in literature at University College London in 1970-72.
Go to Profile#2249
Sarah Gilbert
#19022
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Dame Sarah Catherine Gilbert FRS is an English vaccinologist who is a Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Vaccitech. She specialises in the development of vaccines against influenza and emerging viral pathogens. She led the development and testing of the universal flu vaccine, which underwent clinical trials in 2011.
Go to Profile#2250
Dan Blazer
#31288
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Daniel German Blazer is the J.P. Gibbons Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Duke University School of Medicine. Education After graduating from Cohn High School in 1962, Blazer received his bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University in 1965. He later received his MD from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in 1969 and his MPH and PhD in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1979 and 1980, respectively.
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