Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#2401

Samuel Mcdonald Mccann

#67193

Overall Influence

#2402

Luciano Fadiga

#55830

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Luciano Fadiga is a neurophysiologist at the Human Physiology Section of the University of Ferrara and a Senior Researcher at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia of Genoa, Italy. Born in 1961. M.D., University of Bologna, Ph.D. in Neuroscience, University of Parma. Senior Researcher at the University of Parma since 1992. He is actually Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Ferrara and Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology . He is the director of the IIT Center for Traslational Neurophysiology. He has a long experience in electrophysiology and neurophysiology in...

#2403

Michael Menaker

#54406

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Michael Menaker , was an American chronobiology researcher, and was Commonwealth Professor of Biology at University of Virginia. His research focused on circadian rhythmicity of vertebrates, including contributing to an understanding of light input pathways on extra-retinal photoreceptors of non-mammalian vertebrates, discovering a mammalian mutation for circadian rhythmicity , and locating a circadian oscillator in the pineal gland of bird. He wrote almost 200 scientific publications.

#2404

Jean Shinoda Bolen

#11261

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Jean Shinoda Bolen is an American psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and author. She is of Japanese descent. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, she is an emeritus clinical professor of psychiatry at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, UCSF Medical Center and member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the author of thirteen books in over one hundred foreign editions. She was an NGO delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women .

#2405

Wolfgang Huber

#67229

Overall Influence

Wolfgang Huber is a German computational biologist who serves as group leader for the Huber Group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory , where he is also a senior scientist. He is a founding member of Bioconductor and, alongside Sascha Dietrich, serves the joint head of the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit's group Systems Medicine of Cancer Drugs.

#2406

Eduard Vieta

#40324

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Eduard Vieta Pascual is a Spanish psychiatrist and a leading scientific authority on the neurobiology and treatment of bipolar disorder. Education Eduard Vieta was born in Barcelona, Spain. He studied medicine at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and graduated in 1987. He did his residency training at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona and became a specialist in Psychiatry in 1991. He subsequently received his PhD with honors at the University of Barcelona in 1994.

#2407

Nina Jablonski

#25075

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Nina G. Jablonski is an American anthropologist and palaeobiologist, known for her research into the evolution of skin color in humans. She is engaged in public education about human evolution, human diversity, and racism. In 2021, she was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and in 2009, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She is an Evan Pugh University Professor at The Pennsylvania State University, and the author of the books Skin: A Natural History, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color, and the co-author of Skin We Are In.

#2408

Nelson Hairston

#53951

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Nelson Hairston Sr. was an American ecologist. Hairston is well known for his work in ecology and human disease. In the field of ecology he is famous for championing the idea of the trophic cascade, on which he published the provocative “Green World Hypothesis” with colleagues Frederick E. Smith and Lawrence B. Slobodkin. Nelson was also deeply interested in the factors that control human disease and was an adviser to the World Health Organization for many years.

#2409

Masayuki Yamamoto

#67271

Overall Influence

#2410

Phil Gold

#39840

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Phil Gold is a Canadian physician, scientist, professor and author. Born in Montreal, Quebec, he received a BSc degree in 1957, a MSc degree in 1961, a MD degree in 1961, and a PhD in 1965 from McGill University. He obtained his Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada fellowship certification in Internal Medicine in November 1966.

#2411

Shinya Inoué

#49728

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Shinya Inoué was a Japanese American biophysicist and cell biologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His research field was the visualization of dynamic processes within living cells using light microscopy.

#2412

Alan Ashworth

#53967

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Alan Ashworth, FRS is a British molecular biologist, noted for his work on genes involved in cancer susceptibility. He is currently the President of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco, a multidisciplinary research and clinical care organisation that is one of the largest cancer centres in the Western United States. He was previously CEO of the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

#2413

Matthew Walker

#37149

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Matthew Walker is a British author, scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. As an academic, Walker has focused on the impact of sleep on human health. He has contributed to many scientific research studies. Why We Sleep is his first work of popular science.

#2414

Bernard Crespi

#45407

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Bernard Joseph Crespi is an American professor of evolutionary biology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. His research focuses on social evolution across multiple scales, using genetic and ecological approaches. He is one of the initiators of the imprinted brain hypothesis.

#2415

Maria Elena Bottazzi

#53067

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Maria Elena Bottazzi is an American microbiologist, currently Associate Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, as well as Distinguished Professor of Biology at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. She is editor-in-chief of Springer's Current Tropical Medicine Reports. She and Peter Hotez led the team that designed COVID-19 vaccine Corbevax.

#2416

Marvin Makinen

#34913

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Marvin William Makinen has been a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago since 1974 and is a founding member of the Human Rights Board at the university. Education Born in Chassell, Michigan, Makinen earned a B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961, an M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1968, and a D. Phil. at the University of Oxford in 1976. He is presently professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Chicago, and has served as chairman of the department from 1988 to 1993. His primary research interests i...

#2417

Mary Gehring

#49663

Overall Influence

Mary Gehring is an American plant biologist and epigeneticist who has published extensively on genomic imprinting and demethylation in Arabidopsis thaliana. She has led a laboratory focused on epigenetics at the Whitehead Institute since 2010 and is an associate professor in the biology department at MIT. Gehring graduated from Williams College and received her PhD in 2005 from University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with Robert L. Fischer.

#2418

Ebenezer Laing

#40091

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

Ebenezer Laing, was a Ghanaian botanist and geneticist who served as the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Legon. He was a professor at the University of Ghana, Legon, and later an emeritus professor. Laing, together with his university and faculty colleague, George C. Clerk , was one of the first Ghanaian academics to specialise in botany as a scientific discipline and contributed significantly to the growth of the field in Ghana. He was also a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, inducted in 1965. In 1985, he was elected an inaugural Fellow of the African Academy...

#2419

Bert J. Sakmann

#67376

Overall Influence

#2420

Naomi Datta

#44360

Overall Influence

1922 - 2008 (86 years)

Naomi Datta, FRS was a distinguished British geneticist. Working at Hammersmith Hospital in the 1950s and early 1960s, she identified horizontal gene transfer as a source of multi-antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

#2421

J. Graham White

#67396

Overall Influence

#2422

Razelle Kurzrock

#67423

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#2423

Herbert Kleber

#19986

Overall Influence

1934 - 2018 (84 years)

Herbert David Kleber was an American psychiatrist and substance abuse researcher. His career, centered on the evidence-based treatment of addiction, focused on scientific approaches in place of punishment and moralisms. His career focused on pathology of addiction to help patients reduce the severe discomforts of withdrawal, avoid relapse and stay in recovery.

#2424

Adele Diamond

#19596

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Adele Dorothy Diamond is a professor of neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, where she is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. One of the pioneers in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, Diamond researches how executive functions are affected by biological and environmental factors, especially in children. Her discoveries have improved treatment for disorders such as phenylketonuria and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they have impacted early education.

#2425

Allan Schore

#19381

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Allan N. Schore is an American psychologist and researcher in the field of neuropsychology. Schore works at the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and at the UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development.

#2426

John Edgar Dick

John Edgar Dick

#55663

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

John Edgar Dick is Canada Research Chair in Stem Cell Biology, Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network and Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto in Canada. Dick is credited with first identifying cancer stem cells in certain types of human leukemia. His revolutionary findings highlighted the importance of understanding that not all cancer cells are the same and thus spawned a new direction in cancer research. Dick is also known for his demonstration of a blood stem cell's ability to replenish the blood syst...

#2427

Ana María López Colomé

#49986

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ana María López Colomé is a distinguished Mexican biochemist who won the 2002 L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science – Latin America for her studies on the human retina and the prevention of retinitis pigmentosa and several retinopathies.

#2428

Michael M. C. Lai

#21582

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Ming-Chiao Lai is a Taiwanese virologist. A native of Tainan born on 8 September 1942, Lai graduated from National Tainan First Senior High School and studied medicine at National Taiwan University. After completing his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1973, Lai joined the University of Southern California faculty, where he remained until 2003. While teaching at USC, Lai was elected a member of Academia Sinica in 1992 and a fellow of the American College of Microbiology in 2002. From 1990, Lai was a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. Upon his return to Taiwan in 2003, Lai was named a distinguished fellow of Academia Sinica.

#2429

Harold F. Dvorak

#62361

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Harold Fisher Dvorak is an American pathologist and vascular researcher. He is the founding Director of the Center for Vascular Biology Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Mallinckrodt Distinguished Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Dvorak is best known for his discovery of vascular endothelial growth factor , for which he received the Canada Gairdner International Award of 2014.

#2430

Paul G. Risser

#30223

Overall Influence

1939 - 2014 (75 years)

Paul Gillan Risser was an American ecologist and academic from Oklahoma. He served as president of Miami University and Oregon State University before becoming chancellor of the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education.

#2431

William G. Conway

#46183

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

William Gaylord Conway was an American zoologist, ornithologist and conservationist. William Gaylord Conway was born on November 20, 1929, in St. Louis, Missouri. He began his career with the St. Louis Zoo. He joined the New York Zoological Society in 1956 as assistant curator of birds. He was later promoted to director of the society, and then became president of it in 1992 when it was reconfigured into the Wildlife Conservation Society. He retired as president in 1999 and retained the title of senior conservationist.

#2432

Astrid Løken

#57454

Overall Influence

1911 - 2008 (97 years)

Astrid Løken was a Norwegian entomologist and member of the Norwegian resistance movement during World War II. Spending most of her career at Bergen Museum, from 1949 to 1979, she was the first female member of the Norwegian Entomological Society, and specialized in the bumblebee genus Bombus.

#2433

Herbert Weissbach

#67568

Overall Influence

#2434

Hopi Hoekstra

#49549

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Danielle "Hopi" Elizabeth Hoekstra is an evolutionary biologist working at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and serving as the Dean of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her lab uses natural populations of rodents to study the genetic basis of adaptation. She is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She is also the Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a Harvard College Professor. In 2014, Hoekstra became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

#2435

Michael B. Yaffe

#44646

Overall Influence

Michael B. Yaffe is an American scientist, professor, surgeon, and retired U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps Colonel. He is currently the David H. Koch Professor of Biology & Biological Engineering at MIT and a trauma surgeon at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 2016, the United States Army awarded him the Bronze Star Medal for his services as a trauma surgeon on active duty in Afghanistan. He also treated many of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.

#2436

Jean‐françois Bach

#67671

Overall Influence

#2437

Franz M. Wuketits

Franz M. Wuketits

#30008

Overall Influence

1955 - 2018 (63 years)

Franz Manfred Wuketits was an Austrian biologist, university teacher and epistemologist. He wrote extensively on epistemology, the history and theory of biology, evolution theory, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary epistemology and sociobiology.

#2438

C. Clark Cockerham

#59406

Overall Influence

1921 - 1996 (75 years)

Columbus Clark Cockerham was an American statistical geneticist known for his work in quantitative genetics. Early life and education Cockerham was born on December 21, 1921 in Mountain Park, North Carolina. He grew up nearby on his family's farm. He received his B.S. degree in agriculture from the North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering in 1943. After serving in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, he returned to North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering, where he received his M.S. in animal industry in 1949. In 1952, he received his Ph.D....

#2439

François Gros

#24744

Overall Influence

1925 - 2022 (97 years)

François Gros was a French biologist and one of the pioneers of cellular biochemistry in France. His scientific career concerned genes and their role in regulating cellular functions. Honorary professor at the Collège de France, member of the Institute of France, he was also director of the Pasteur Institute and advisor to Prime Ministers Pierre Mauroy and Laurent Fabius .

#2440

George Bornemissza

#35186

Overall Influence

1924 - 2014 (90 years)

George Francis Bornemissza was a Hungarian-born entomologist and ecologist. He studied science at the University of Budapest before obtaining his Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria in 1950. At the end of that year, he emigrated to Australia. There he first worked in the Department of Zoology at the University of Western Australia for 3 years, before pursuing a career with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation . Bornemissza was known for his work on the Australian Dung Beetle Project while working at CSIRO's Division of Entomology. He wrote...

#2441

Mariano Barbacid

Mariano Barbacid

#41023

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mariano Barbacid Montalbán is a Spanish molecular biochemist who discovered the first oncogene HRAS. Academic career He completed his higher education in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he studied chemical sciences, and in the United States, where he started as an intern; years later he was appointed director of the National Cancer Institute. He then moved back to his native Spain to lead the newly created CNIO . He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2011.

#2442

Douglas Vakoch

#12908

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Douglas A. Vakoch is an American astrobiologist, search for extraterrestrial intelligence researcher, psychologist, and president of METI International, a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to transmitting intentional signals to extraterrestrial civilizations. Vakoch led METI's participation in Sónar Calling GJ 273b, which transmitted a series of interstellar messages to Luyten's Star, located 12.4 light years from Earth. Vakoch advocates ongoing transmission projects, arguing that this does not increase risks of an alien invasion as suggested by British cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

#2443

Albert Stunkard

#40110

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Albert J. Stunkard was an American psychiatrist. He is known for his first descriptions of binge eating disorder and night eating syndrome in the 1950s. Life Albert Stunkard was born in Manhattan, New York City, as the son of biologist Horace Stunkard. He studied medicine at Yale University and received his bachelor's degree in 1943. He received his MD from Columbia University in 1945. During World War II, he served as a physician in the United States Army in Japan. He was a lifelong student of D. T. Suzuki.

#2444

Sandra Lavorel

#39778

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Sandra Lavorel is a French ecologist specializing in functional ecology. She is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research where she works at the Alpine Ecology Laboratory in Grenoble, France. She has been a member of the French Academy of sciences since 2013 In 2020, she was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2023, she was the recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal.

#2445

Edward John Wherry III

#33567

Overall Influence

Edward John Wherry III is an American immunologist. He is the Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President's Distinguished Professor and department chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of the Penn Institute for Immunology.

#2446

Vinay Kumar

#34761

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Vinay Kumar is the Lowell T. Coggeshall Distinguished Service Professor of Pathology at the University of Chicago, where he was also the Chairman of the Department of Pathology. He is a recipient of Life Time Achievement Award by National Board of Examinations.

#2447

Hans Günther Aach

#25593

Overall Influence

1919 - 1999 (80 years)

Hans Günther Aach was a German botanist. Life Aach was born in Oldenburg. He gained his doctorate in March 1952 in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Göttingen. In July 1961 he presented his professorial thesis at the University of Cologne. He spent several months as visiting faculty at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. On 31 December 1962 he was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Botany at the RWTH Aachen University. From 12 January 1965 he was appointed to the Chair of Botany in the same place and made director of the Botanical Institute.

#2448

Klaus Mosbach

#61858

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Klaus Mosbach is a Swedish biochemist. He is now professor emeritus at the department of pure and applied biochemistry of Lund University. He founded the Center for Molecular Imprinting in Lund, Sweden, . He has also been co-founder of the Institute of biotechnology at ETH Zurich Switzerland 1982, . He is a great visionary who gave shape to the modern era of Molecular imprinting for which he has been awarded the plaque at the international meeting of molecular imprinting in 2010 in New Orleans, United States of America.

#2449

Vince Calhoun

#50696

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Vince Daniel Calhoun is an American engineer and neuroscientist. He directs the Tri-institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science , a partnership between Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Emory University, and holds faculty appointments at all three institutions. He was formerly the President of the Mind Research Network and a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico.

#2450

Malcolm Ferguson-Smith

#53007

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Malcolm Andrew Ferguson-Smith, is a British geneticist. Early life and education Ferguson-Smith was born in Glasgow in 1931, the son of physician John Ferguson-Smith and educated at Stowe School. He graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1955 with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions