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,
#2301
Nancy Rabalais
#33225
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nancy Nash Rabalais is an American marine ecologist. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, she is the daughter of Kathryn Charlotte Preusch and Stephen Anthony Nash, a mechanical engineer, and the second of four children. She researches dead zones in the marine environment and is an expert in eutrophication and nutrient pollution.
Go to Profile#2302
Michael P. Snyder
#57597
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michael P. Snyder is an American genomicist and the Stanford B. Ascherman Professor, and since 2009, chair of genetics and director of genomics and personalized medicine at Stanford University. He is the former director of the Yale Center for Genomics and Proteomics. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. During his tenure as chair of the department at Stanford, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Stanford University first or tied for first in genetics, genomics and bioinformatics under his leadership.
Go to Profile#2303
Leslie Ungerleider
#36567
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Leslie G. Ungerleider was an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, previously Chief of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health. Ungerleider was known for introducing the concepts of the dorsal and ventral streams, two pathways of information processing in the brain that specialize in visuospatial processing and object recognition, respectively.
Go to Profile#2304
Margaret S. Collins
#46949
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
Margaret James Strickland Collins was an African-American child prodigy, entomologist specializing in the study of termites, and a civil rights advocate. Collins was nicknamed the "Termite Lady" because of her extensive research on termites. Together with David Nickle, Collins identified a new species of termite called Neotermes luykxi. When Collins earned her PhD., she became the first African American female entomologist and the third African American female zoologist.
Go to Profile#2305
Björn Folkow
#49235
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Björn Folkow was a Swedish physiologist. He was professor in physiology at the University of Gothenburg between 1961 and 1987 and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Biography Björn Folkow was born in Halmstad, Sweden. He studied medicine at Lund University where he continued with doctoral studies in physiology. He defended his thesis on 9 May 1949. Soon thereafter he became associate professor at the new Department of Physiology at the University of Gothenburg. He became full professor in 1961 and remained there until his retirement in 1987. Even after retirement he continue...
Go to Profile#2306
Tyler Volk
#27920
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Tyler Volk is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Biology at New York University. His areas of interest include principles of form and function in systems , environmental challenges to global prosperity, CO2 and global change, biosphere theory and the role of life in earth dynamics.
Go to Profile#2307
Stella Chess
#17621
Overall Influence
1914 - 2007 (93 years)
Stella Chess was an American child psychiatrist who taught at New York University . With her husband, Alexander Thomas, she undertook research into whether the temperaments of children are innate or are dependent on their nurturing. She also conducted studies on the potential links between rubella during pregnancy and autism in the child.
Go to Profile#2308
Julie Theriot
#31894
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Julie A. Theriot is a microbiologist, professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and heads the Theriot Lab. She was a Predoctoral Fellow and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was a fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Go to Profile#2309
Melvyn A. Goodale
#34535
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Melvyn Alan Goodale FRSC, FRS is a Canadian neuroscientist. He was the founding Director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience. He holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology, Physiology & Pharmacology, and Ophthalmology at Western. Goodale's research focuses on the neural substrates of visual perception and visuomotor control.
Go to Profile#2310
Kenneth Brinkhous
#44683
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Kenneth Merle Brinkhous was a professor and chairperson in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Brinkhous remained active in research until shortly before his death.
Go to Profile#2311
Eliora Z. Ron
#56623
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Eliora Zenziper Ron is an Israeli microbiologist who is the Secretary General of the European Academy of Microbiology and President of the International Union of Microbiology Societies. Life and career Ron received her MSc in microbiology, Genetics and Biochemistry in 1962 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, before moving to the US to do her PhD at Harvard University under the supervision of Professor Bernard D Davies in 1967. Her PhD thesis was entitled ‘Studies on the regulation of RNA synthesis in Escherichia coli’.
Go to Profile#2312
Martin Cheek
#51574
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Martin Roy Cheek is a botanist and taxonomist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Cheek attended the University of Reading, graduating with a B.Sc. in 1981 and a M.Sc. in 1983. He earned his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1989.
Go to Profile#2313
Grahame Hardie
#65300
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Grahame Hardie FRS, FRSE, FMedSci is a Scottish biochemist, and Professor of Cellular Signalling, at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. Career and research He was a member of the Faculty of 1000. He is the father of AMPK.
Go to Profile#2314
Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke
#44287
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke was a German zoologist, ornithologist, and herpetologist. He was married to ornithologist Maria Koepcke, and was the father of mammalogist Juliane Koepcke. Scientific work in Peru Koepcke studied at the University of Kiel, Germany, earning a doctorate in Natural Sciences in 1947. He then traveled to Peru where he started work at the Javier Prado Museum of Natural History in Lima, an institution affiliated with the National University of San Marcos.
Go to Profile#2315
Brian Walker
#44762
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Brian Harrison Walker is a scientist specialized in ecological sustainability and resilience in socio-ecological systems. Education and academic career Brian Walker began his scientific career in Rhodesia , where his research was on ecosystem function and dynamics in tropical savannas and rangelands. He earned his Ph.D. in the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada in 1968.
Go to Profile#2316
Karlman Wasserman
#60566
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Karlman Wasserman was an American physiologist and professor. Wasserman worked extensively on pulmonary physiology, using exercise testing for the interaction of cardiovascular, ventilatory and metabolic responses. He is the founder of the Wasserman 9-Panel Plot.
Go to Profile#2317
D. Bernard Amos
#44106
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Dennis Bernard Amos was a British born American immunologist. National Academies Press called Amos "one of the most distinguished scientists of the genetics of individuality of the twentieth century". In 1969, Amos and Dr. David Hume founded the first regional organ sharing program in the United States. Amos made significant contributions in immunogenetics, tumor immunity, and transplantation immunology.
Go to Profile#2318
Thomas Tedder
#59843
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Thomas Fletcher Tedder is an American immunologist. He is best known for his work in the fields of B lymphocyte biology and regulation. He is currently the Alter E. Geller Professor for Research in Immunology at Duke University.
Go to Profile#2319
Michael D. Swords
#36538
Overall Influence
Michael D. Swords is a retired professor of Natural Science at Western Michigan University, who writes about general sciences and anomalous phenomena, particularly parapsychology, cryptozoology, and ufology, editing the academic publication The Journal of UFO Studies. He is a board member of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.
Go to Profile#2320
David E. Cane
#38989
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David E. Cane is an American biological chemist. He is Vernon K. Krieble Professor of Chemistry Emeritus and professor of molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry emeritus at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He is recognized for his work on the biosynthesis of natural products, particularly terpenoids and polyketides. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003 and as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013.
Go to Profile#2321
Harry Beevers
#50654
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Harry Beevers was an English-born American plant physiologist. Beevers made major contributions to the understanding of plant metabolism and plant cell biology. Beevers widely noted for the discovery of the glyoxylate cycle in seedlings of plants that results in the production of glucose during early seedling growth. He served as president of the American Society of Plant Physiologists. University of California called Beevers "one of the leading plant physiologists of the 20th century". Beevers was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. ...
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Gary Beauchamp
#49657
Overall Influence
Dr. Gary K. Beauchamp was the director and president of the Monell Chemical Senses Center from August 1990 to September 2014. Dr. Beauchamp graduated from Carleton College in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in biology. He received his Ph.D. in biopsychology in 1971 from The Pritzker School of Medicine of the University of Chicago. He joined the newly established Monell Center as a postdoctoral fellow in 1971, was appointed to the faculty in 1973, and attained the rank of Member in 1981.
Go to Profile#2323
Jay Shendure
#48720
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Jay Shendure is an American scientist and human geneticist at the University of Washington. He is a professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine and an Affiliate Investigator in the Human Biology Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Shendure's research is focused on developing and applying new technologies in genomics. In 2005, his doctoral research with George M. Church resulted one of the first successful proof-of-concepts of next-generation DNA sequencing. Shendure's research group at the University of Washington pionee...
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Stuart F. Schlossman
#65942
Overall Influence
#2325
Peter B. de Menocal
#38314
Overall Influence
Peter B. de Menocal is an oceanographer and paleoclimatologist. He is the president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a research facility in Massachusetts. Education De Menocal earned a B.S. in geology from St. Lawrence University in 1982, an M.S. in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island in 1986, and his Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University in 1991.
Go to Profile#2326
Michael H. Stone
#11706
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Michael H. Stone is an American psychiatrist and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. Early life and education Stone was born in Syracuse, New York, on October 27, 1933. He acquired his B.A. from Cornell University in 1954, where he was mentored by Professor Harry Caplan in Latin and Greek, and completed medical school at Cornell University in 1958. He was mentored by psychoanalyst Dr. Harold Searles from 1958 to 1963, and trained in hematology under Dr. Allyn Ley at Memorial Sloan-Kettering from 1961 to 1963. He comp...
Go to Profile#2327
Michael B. A. Oldstone
#65968
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
#2328
Patrick McGorry
#20286
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Patrick Dennistoun McGorry FAA FASSA FAHMS FRCP FRANZCP is an Irish-born Australian psychiatrist known for his development of the early intervention services for emerging mental disorders in young people.
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James Ehleringer
#59291
Overall Influence
James Ehleringer is an American biologist and Distinguished Professor of at the University of Utah. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Ecological Society of America, and American Association for Advancement of Science. He is an ISI Highly Cited researcher. Together with Thure E. Cerling, he established the Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry and Ecology summer course at the University of Utah, which "trains students in the fundamental environmental and biological theory underlying isotope fractionation processes across a broa...
Go to Profile#2330
David Van Essen
#44603
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
David C. Van Essen is an American neuroscientist specializing in neurobiology and studies the structure, function, development, connectivity and evolution of the cerebral cortex of humans and nonhuman relatives. After over two decades of teaching at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, he currently serves as an Alumni Endowed Professor of Neuroscience and maintains an active laboratory. Van Essen has held numerous positions, including Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuroscience, Secretary of the Society for Neuroscience, and the President of the Society for Neuroscience from 2006 to 2007.
Go to Profile#2331
Wolfgang H. Berger
#43688
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Wolfgang "Wolf" Helmut Berger was a German-American oceanographer, geologist, micropaleontologist and emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. His research interests comprise "micropaleontology, marine sedimentation, ocean productivity, carbon cycle, ocean history, climate history, and history of oceanography."
Go to Profile#2332
Aravinda Chakravarti
#52679
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Aravinda Chakravarti is a human geneticist and expert in computational biology, and Director of the Center For Human Genetics & Genomics at New York University. He was the 2008 President of the American Society of Human Genetics. Chakravarti became a co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genome Research in 1995, and of the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics' in 2005.
Go to Profile#2333
Vishva Dixit
#57244
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Vishva Mitra Dixit is a physician of Indian origin who is the current Vice President of Discovery Research at Genentech. Early life and education Vishva Dixit was born in Kenya in 1956. His parents were both physicians, working for the British colonial authorities. Dixit was interested in science from an early age, and his parents encouraged him to pursue a career in medicine. He graduated in 1980 from the University of Nairobi with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, becoming a medical doctor.
Go to Profile#2334
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
#5530
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss-American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, and author of the internationally best-selling book, On Death and Dying , where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief, also known as the "Kübler-Ross model".
Go to Profile#2335
William Gilly
#48582
Overall Influence
William Frank Gilly is an American biologist specializing in the study of cephalopods. He works at Gilly Lab, Hopkins Marine Station, in Monterey County, as a professor of biology, at Stanford University and was involved with the television special The Future is Wild.
Go to Profile#2336
Lynn Dalgarno
#55601
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Lynn Dalgarno is an Australian geneticist known for the discovery of the Shine-Dalgarno sequence with his graduate student, John Shine. Early life and education The son of Frederick Leslie Roy Dalgarno and Nadine Ilma Dalgarno, Lynn Dalgarno was born at Berklea Private Hospital, Caulfield, Victoria on 13 November 1935.
Go to Profile#2337
Thomas Dyer Seeley
#53939
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Thomas Dyer Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University. He is the author of several books on honeybee behavior, including Honeybee Democracy and The Wisdom of the Hive He was the recipient of the Humboldt Prize in Biology in 2001. He primarily studies swarm intelligence by investigating how bees collectively make decisions.
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Jay M. Savage
#37296
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Jay Mathers Savage is an American herpetologist known for his research on reptiles and amphibians of Central America. He is a past president of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Southern California Academy of Sciences. He received his bachelor's , master's , and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has produced around 200 publications, including the books Evolution and The Amphibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica . He is an emeritus professor at the University of Miami and adjunct professor at San Diego State Unive...
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Margaret Kidwell
#62812
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Margaret Gale Kidwell is a British American evolutionary biologist and Regents' Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She grew up on a farm in the English Midlands during World War II. After graduating from the University of Nottingham in 1953, she worked in the British Civil Service as an Agricultural Advisory Officer from 1955 to 1960. She moved to the US in 1960 under the auspices of a Kellogg Foundation Fellowship to study Genetics and Statistics at Iowa State University. She married quantitative geneticist James F. Kidwell in 1961, obtained her MS degree in 1962 and moved with her husband to Brown University in 1963.
Go to Profile#2340
Keith R. Porter
#66260
Overall Influence
#2341
Geoffrey S. Dawes
#35594
Overall Influence
1918 - 1996 (78 years)
Geoffrey Sharman Dawes, CBE, FRS, FRCOG, FRCP, FACOG, FAAP was an English physiologist and was considered to be the foremost international authority on fetal and neonatal physiology. Biography Dawes was born in 1918 in Mackworth which is within Derbyshire, but he was brought up in Elvaston where his father was the vicar of Elvaston and Thulston. He had four siblings who were all older than he was. Dawes lived at Thurleston Hall, the vicarage for Elvaston. This hall had previously been the home of William Darwin Fox. His prep school was in the next village of Shardlow, where he studied until he started at Repton School which was still within south Derbyshire.
Go to Profile#2342
Dieter Oesterhelt
#40539
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Dieter Oesterhelt was a German biochemist. From 1980 until 2008, he was director of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, Martinsried. Biography Oesterhelt studied chemistry at the University of Munich from 1959 to 1963. From 1964 to 1967 he worked at the Institute of Biochemistry at the same university under Feodor Lynen. He was then a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Chemistry until 1969. From 1969 to 1973 he worked as an academic adviser at the Institute for Biochemistry at the University of Munich and carried out work on the structure, function and biosynthesis of the purple membrane of Halobacterium salinarum.
Go to Profile#2343
James E. Bowman
#19127
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
James Edward Bowman Jr. was an American physician and specialist in pathology, hematology, and genetics. He was a professor of pathology and genetics at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. He published more than ninety works across the fields of human genetics; population genetics; and ethical, legal and public policy issues in human genetics. He received many awards, including the Chicago African American History Makers Award and recognition from the Hastings Center and Stanford’s Kaiser Family Foundation, and Howard University.
Go to Profile#2344
Keith A. Crandall
#56532
Overall Influence
Keith A. Crandall is an American computational biologist, bioinformaticist, and population geneticist at George Washington University, where he is the founding director of the Computational Biology Institute, and professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
Go to Profile#2345
Thea Tlsty
#31664
Overall Influence
Thea D. Tlsty is an American pathologist and professor of pathology at the University of California, San Francisco . She is known for her research in cancer biology and her involvement in the discovery of cells that may be at the origin of metaplastic cancer, an invasive form of breast cancer.
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Maria Leptin
#61593
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Maria Leptin is a German developmental biologist and immunologist, and the current President of the European Research Council. She was the Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization from 2010 to 2021.
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Xiangzhong Yang
#55915
Overall Influence
1959 - 2009 (50 years)
Xiangzhong "Jerry" Yang was a Chinese-American biotechnology scientist, and stem cell research advocate. In 1999 he was credited with creating the first cloned farm animal in the United States – a cow called "Amy".
Go to Profile#2348
Rowena Green Matthews
#32374
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Rowena Green Matthews, born in 1938, is the G. Robert Greenberg Distinguished University professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the role of organic cofactors as partners of enzymes catalyzing difficult biochemical reactions, especially folic acid and cobalamin . Among other honors, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 and the Institute of Medicine in 2004.
Go to Profile#2349
Elizabeth Robertson
#62754
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Elizabeth Jane Robertson is a British developmental biologist based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. She is Professor of Developmental Biology at Oxford and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. She is best known for her pioneering work in developmental genetics, showing that genetic mutations could be introduced into the mouse germ line by using genetically altered embryonic stem cells. This discovery opened up a major field of experimentation for biologists and clinicians.
Go to Profile#2350
Leemor Joshua-Tor
#53759
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Leemor Joshua-Tor is the W.M. Keck Professor of Structural Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Her research focuses on the role of the argonaute complex in RNA interference.
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