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,
#2251
Fiorenza Micheli
#62652
Overall Influence
Fiorenza "Fio" Micheli is an Italian-American marine ecologist and conservation biologist. Early life and education Micheli was born and raised in Italy. Upon graduating from the University of Florence, where she studied animal behavior, she accepted a job collecting intertidal animals for a nature documentary. Following this, she enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her PhD and at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for her post-doctoral research. In 1996, Micheli obtained a grant from the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries to settle a...
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Jeannie T. Lee
#50863
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jeannie T. Lee is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She is known for her work on X-chromosome inactivation and for discovering the functions of a new class of epigenetic regulators known as long noncoding RNAs , including Xist and Tsix.
Go to Profile#2253
Bessel van der Kolk
#3844
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist, author, researcher and educator based in Boston, United States. Since the 1970s his research has been in the area of post-traumatic stress. He is the author of The New York Times best seller, The Body Keeps the Score.
Go to Profile#2254
Per Alström
#57333
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Per Johan Alström is a Swedish Professor of ornithology. He researches in taxonomy, systematics, and evolution, with birds in Asia as a specialty. Alström works at the Department of Ecology and Genetics at Uppsala University and at the Swedish Species Information Centre at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala. He has previously worked as e.g. Curator of Ornithology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and been a guest researcher at the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town and a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
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Brigitte Askonas
#39800
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Brigitte Alice Askonas was a British immunologist and a visiting professor at Imperial College London from 1995. Education Brigitte Askonas was born to Czechoslovak parents, Jewish converts to Catholicism, who fled Austria after the Nazi takeover. Vienna-born Askonas studied biochemistry at McGill University and carried out her postgraduate work in the school of biochemistry at the University of Cambridge where she was a student of Girton College, Cambridge.
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J. Edwin Seegmiller
#30550
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
J Edwin Seegmiller, or Jay Seegmiller, was an American physician and biochemical geneticist best known for his role in discovering the biochemical basis of the Lesch–Nyhan syndrome. He was a rheumatologist and a pioneer in research on arthritic diseases and on aging.
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Toby Gibson
#61245
Overall Influence
Toby James Gibson is a group leader and biochemist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg known for his work on Clustal. According to Nature, Gibson's co-authored papers describing Clustal are among the top ten most highly cited scientific papers of all time.
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Jürg Tschopp
#63769
Overall Influence
1951 - 2011 (60 years)
Jürg Tschopp was a Swiss biochemist, known for his research on apoptosis and the immunology of inflammation. His greatest achievement was perhaps his team's discovery and scientific description of the inflammasome .
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Jeffries Wyman
#49577
Overall Influence
1901 - 1995 (94 years)
Jeffries Wyman was an American molecular biologist and biophysicist notable for his research of proteins, amino acids, and on the physical chemistry of hemoglobin, including the classic Monod–Wyman–Changeux model.
Go to Profile#2260
Carsten Bresch
#45546
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Carsten Bresch was a German geneticist and physicist. He was a professor at the University of Freiburg at the Faculty of Biology. Working in Göttingen, Cologne, Dallas, and Freiburg, he was a pioneer of genetics of bacteriophages, writing the standard Classical and Molecular Genetics.
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Margaret D. Lowman
#48639
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Margaret D. Lowman, Ph.D. a.k.a. Canopy Meg is an American biologist, educator, ecologist, writer, explorer, and public speaker. Her expertise involves canopy ecology, canopy plant-insect relationships, and constructing canopy walkways.
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Dmitri Petrov
#54366
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Dmitri Alexandrovich Petrov is an russian biologist. He was born in Moscow and earned a master's degree in physics and molecular biology in 1989 from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Petrov obtained a doctorate in biology from Harvard University under the guidance of Richard Lewontin and Dan Hartl, continued at Harvard as a Junior Fellow and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Ting Wu, and then joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2000. He was appointed to Associate Professor with tenure in 2005, to Professor in 2009, and the Kevin and Michelle Douglas Endowed Professo...
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William T. Wickner
#50981
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
William T. Wickner , is an authority on membrane fusion, a fundamental process in all eukaryotic cells. Education Bill Wickner, brother of prion biologist Reed Wickner and Cornell graduate Nancy Wickner Kogan, is a 1967 graduate of Yale University and a 1973 M.D. graduate of Harvard Medical School. At Harvard, he worked with Eugene P. Kennedy.
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Charis Eng
#53529
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Charis Eng is a Singapore-born physician-scientist and geneticist at the Cleveland Clinic, notable for identifying the PTEN gene. She is the Chairwoman and founding Director of the Genomic Medicine Institute of the Cleveland Clinic, founding Director and attending clinical cancer geneticist of the institute’s clinical component, the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, and Professor and Vice Chairwoman of the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
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John Coffin
#55877
Overall Influence
John Coffin is an American virologist. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, raised in Schenectady, New York, Coffin is a professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology at Tufts University in Boston. He is also the former director of the HIV Dynamics and Replication Program of the National Cancer Institute and serves as special advisor to the director of the Center for Cancer Research at NCI. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of American Cancer Society professorship. He has advised policy committees at the national level regarding retrovirus-related matters. Coff...
Go to Profile#2266
Lawrence Corey
#62188
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Research and career In the early 1980s, Corey worked with Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and pharmacologist Dr. Gertrude Elion to demonstrate that an antiviral that was selective and specific for a viral-specified enzyme could be safely and effectively administered to control a chronic viral infection . Corey first conceived of, demonstrated the core concepts and directed line association between quantitative viral load reduction and clinical benefit using topical, intravenous and oral formulations of acyclovir in classic studies performed between 1980 and 1984. Acyclovir was the first antivir...
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Donald F. Hunt
#36328
Overall Influence
Donald F. Hunt is the University Professor of Chemistry and Pathology at the University of Virginia. He is known for his research in the field of mass spectrometry, he developed electron capture negative ion mass spectrometry. He has received multiple awards for his work including the Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and the Thomson Medal from the International Mass Spectrometry Society.
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Luciano Marraffini
#45110
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Luciano Marraffini is an Argentinian-American microbiologist. He is currently professor and head of the laboratory of bacteriology at The Rockefeller University. He is recognized for his work on CRISPR-Cas systems, being one of the first scientists to elucidate how these systems work at the molecular level.
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Adnane Remmal
#44846
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Adnane Remmal is a Moroccan pharmacology professor, senior researcher and entrepreneur in the field of biotechnology at the University of Fez, Morocco. He was born 1962 in Fez, Morocco. His works focus on fighting antimicrobial resistance, one of the major threats to public health in both developed and emerging countries. Among other results, he has successfully patented a solution to boost antibiotics against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and an alternative to replace antibiotics in poultry feed. In 2017, he was the recipient of the European Patent Office Popular Prize category award. EPO...
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Henry David Abraham
#12703
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Henry David Abraham is an American physician. He was a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. Education Abraham completed his undergraduate studies in 1963 at Muhlenberg College in Allentown with honors such as Omicron Delta Kappa, Pennsylvania, where he was valedictorian. He received his medical degree in 1967 from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. After completing postgraduate training in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1968, he completed a residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in ...
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Ary Hoffmann
#64475
Overall Influence
Ary Anthony Hoffmann is an Australian entomologist and geneticist who studied at Monash University and La Trobe University. He is the chair of ecological genetics and Melbourne Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. and leads the Pest & Environmental Adaptation Research Group at the University of Melbourne Bio21 Institute.
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Samuel L. Stanley
#16503
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Samuel L. Stanley Jr. is an American educator and biomedical researcher. He was the President of Michigan State University from 2019 until November 2022, and he was the President of Stony Brook University from 2009 to 2019. Stanley is one of the founding directors of the Midwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research.
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Robert C. Elston
#57756
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert C. Elston is a British born statistical geneticist and distinguished professor emeritus at Case Western Reserve University. He is one of the eponyms of the Elston–Stewart algorithm and Haseman–Elston regression.
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Daniel W. Bradley
#28613
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Daniel W. Bradley is an important American virologist who, along with Michael Houghton, Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo at Chiron Corporation, worked to help isolate the Hepatitis C virus in 1989. He graduated from San José State University in 1964 before going on to receive a master's degree in biochemistry from the University of California and a doctorate from the University of Arizona. He worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention starting in 1971. He received the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award of the American Association of Blood Banks in 1992, the Robert Koch Prize in 1993, a...
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Michael J. Kuhar
#56904
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael J. Kuhar , is an American neuroscientist, author, and Candler Professor of Neuropharmacology at The Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University. He is a Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar, and a senior fellow in the Center for Ethics at Emory. He was previously a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and branchchief at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
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Heng Li
#32462
Overall Influence
Heng Li is a Chinese bioinformatics scientist. He is an associate professor at the department of Biomedical Informatics of Harvard Medical School and the department of Data Science of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He was previously a research scientist working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts with David Reich and David Altshuler. Li's work has made several important contributions in the field of next generation sequencing.
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Alimuddin Zumla
#20381
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Sir Alimuddin Zumla, , FRCP, FRCPath, FRSB is a British-Zambian professor of infectious diseases and international health at University College London Medical School. He specialises in infectious and tropical diseases, clinical immunology, and internal medicine, with a special interest in HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections , and diseases of poverty. He is known for his leadership of infectious/tropical diseases research and capacity development activities. He was awarded a Knighthood in the 2017 Queens Birthday Honours list for services to public health and protection from infectious disease. I...
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John W. Oswald
#64731
Overall Influence
1917 - 1995 (78 years)
John Wieland Oswald was president of the University of Kentucky, executive vice president of the University of California, and President of the Pennsylvania State University. Biography Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1917, Oswald did his undergraduate work in botany at DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana and received his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1942. During World War II, Oswald served as a PT boat captain in the Mediterranean.
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Kevin Folta
#21569
Overall Influence
Kevin M. Folta is a professor of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida. From 2007 to 2010 he helped lead the project to sequence the strawberry genome, and continues to research photomorphogenesis in plants and compounds responsible for flavor in strawberries. Folta has been active as a science communicator since 2002, especially relating to biotechnology. He has faced controversy over what his critics say are his industry connections. In 2017 he was elected as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
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David Agard
#30355
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David A. Agard is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He earned his B.S. in molecular biochemistry and biophysics from Yale University and his Ph.D. in biological chemistry from California Institute of Technology. His research is focused on understanding the basic principles of macromolecular structure and function. He is a scientific director of the Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology, and Quantitative Biomedical Research and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1986.
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Bernard Verdcourt
#54621
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Bernard Verdcourt was a biologist and taxonomist, most widely known as a botanist and latterly an honorary research fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London. Prior to coming to Kew in 1964, he was associated with the East African Herbarium for 15 years. Although his best-known work probably consists of his many studies of the East African flora, he has also made extensive contributions relating to African terrestrial mollusks and to entomology. Dr. Verdcourt received the Linnean Medal for botany from the Linnean Society of London in 2000. His list of publications includes more than ...
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Michael R. Hayden
#37928
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael R. Hayden, is a Killam Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia, the highest honour UBC can confer on any faculty member. Only four such awards have ever been conferred in the Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Hayden is also Canada Research Chair in Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine. Hayden is best known for his research in Huntington disease .
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Eric Schadt
#21167
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eric Emil Schadt is an American mathematician and computational biologist. He is founder and former chief executive officer of Sema4, a patient-centered health intelligence company, and dean for precision medicine and Mount Sinai Professor in Predictive Health and Computational Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He was previously founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology and chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
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Denham Harman
#8427
Overall Influence
1916 - 2014 (98 years)
Denham Harman was an American medical academic who latterly served as professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Harman is known as the "father of the free radical theory of aging".
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Jean-Paul Thiery
#64992
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jean Paul Thiery is a French biologist born on 25 April 1947. He is director of emeritus research at the CNRS-Paris-Diderot University laboratory on complex materials and systems, at the Institut Gustave Roussy's cancer centre and associate professor at several foreign universities.
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Richard D. Palmiter
#65202
Overall Influence
#2287
Li-Huei Tsai
#46152
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Li-Huei Tsai is an American neuroscientist and the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Simon Gandevia
#63253
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Simon Gandevia is from Melbourne, Australia. He studied at the University of New South Wales where he received three research doctorates: PhD, MD, and DSc. Gandevia's current research focuses primarily on the relationship between the human brain and movement. His work contributes to various sub-fields within medicine particularly focusing on pathological mechanisms, such as neurology, cardiorespiratory medicine and rehabilitation. In addition, he worked with many editorial boards such as the Journal of Physiology. Gandevia had supervised and trained several doctoral students. Gandevia also wri...
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Alejandra Bravo
#56422
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
María Alejandra Bravo de la Parra is a Mexican biochemist who was laureated with the 2010 L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science – Latin America for her work on a bacterial toxin that acts as a powerful insecticide. Bravo has co-authored multiple papers with her husband Mario Soberon.
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Leslie D. Gottlieb
#56087
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Leslie David Gottlieb was a United States biologist described by the Botanical Society of America as "one of the most influential plant evolutionary biologists over the past several decades". He was employed at the University of California, Davis for 34 years, and published widely. In addition to his primary work in plant genetics, Gottlieb was an advocate for rare and endangered plant conservation.
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Edward Boyse
#54143
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Edward A. Boyse FRS, AAAS, NAS was a British-born, American physician and biologist best known for his research on the immune system and pheromones. Life Boyse was born in Worthing, England, and studied medicine at the University of London.
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A.E. Walsby
#61435
Overall Influence
Anthony Edward Walsby, BSc, PhD, FRS, is the Emeritus Professor of Microbiology at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. He is a researcher in the fields of Algae, Cyanobacteria, lake ecology, gas vesicles/vacuoles and genetics, covering the European lakes and Baltic Sea. He is noted for his discovery of Haloquadratum walsbyi in brine ponds on the Sinai Peninsula in 1980. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, 11 March 1993.
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Suzanne Oparil
#57250
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Suzanne Oparil is a clinical cardiologist and Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Professor of Cell, Developmental, and Integrative Biology. She is the Section Chief of Vascular Biology and Hypertension and the Director of the Vascular Biology and Hypertension Program of the Division of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical School.
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Barbara Wold
#57011
Overall Influence
Barbara J. Wold is the Bren Professor of Molecular Biology, the principal investigator of the Wold Lab at the California Institute of Technology and the principal investigator of the Functional Genomics Resource Center at the Beckman Institute at Caltech. Wold was director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech from 2001 to 2011.
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Lorenzo Galluzzi
#56686
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Lorenzo Galluzzi is an Italian and French cell biologist best known for his experimental and conceptual contributions to the fields of cell death, autophagy, tumor metabolism and tumor immunology. Biography Galluzzi is currently assistant professor of Cell Biology in Radiation Oncology at the Department of Radiation Oncology of the Weill Cornell Medical College and Assistant Professor Adjunct at the Department of Dermatology of the Yale University School of Medicine . Prior to joining Weill Cornell Medical College , Galluzzi was a Junior Scientist of the Research Team "Apoptosis, Cancer and Immunity" at the Cordeliers Research Center under the direction of Dr.
Go to Profile#2296
Linda Vigilant
#59113
Overall Influence
Linda Ann Vigilant is an American primatologist and geneticist. Vigilant works at the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
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Richard Ellis
#43154
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Richard Ellis is an American marine biologist, author, and illustrator. He is a research associate in the American Museum of Natural History's division of paleontology, special adviser to the American Cetacean Society, and a member of the Explorers Club. He was U.S. delegate to International Whaling Commission from 1980 to 1990.
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Aubrey Manning
#29895
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Aubrey William George Manning, OBE, FRSE, FRSB, was an English zoologist and broadcaster. Life Manning, the son of William, who worked for the Home and Colonial Stores, and Hilda, was born in Chiswick, but moved with his family to Englefield Green in Surrey when the Second World War broke out, to escape the Blitz.
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Ira Black
#42212
Overall Influence
1941 - 2006 (65 years)
Ira Barrie Black was an American physician and neuroscientist who was an advocate of stem cell research and was the first director of the Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School which was created to advance research in the field.
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Don E. Wilson
#47201
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Don Ellis Wilson is an American zoologist. His main research field is mammalogy, especially the group of bats which he studied in 65 countries around the world. Career Wilson spent his childhood and youth in Nebraska, Texas, Oregon and Washington. After finishing high school in Bisbee, Arizona in 1961 he graduated to Bachelor of Science from the University of Arizona in 1965. Still an under-graduate in 1964, he made his first expedition to the tropics, to which he travelled many times in the subsequent decades to study the mammalian fauna.
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