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).

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School

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Subdiscipline

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#2451

Naşide Gözde Durmuş

#28773

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Naside Gözde Durmuş is a Turkish scientist and geneticist. She is currently Assistant Professor of Radiology at Stanford University. Her research focuses on nanotechnology and micro-technology applications on current world-threatening health issues, like cancer and antibiotic resistance. In 2015, MIT Technology Review listed her under the category of pioneers in the magazine's list of 35 Innovators Under 35.

#2452

Maia Majumder

#34379

Overall Influence

Maimuna Majumder is a computational epidemiologist and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital's Computational Health Informatics Program . She is currently working on modeling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

#2453

James Learmonth Gowans

#27956

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Sir James Learmonth Gowans was a British physician and immunologist. In 1945, while studying medicine at King's College Hospital, he assisted at the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a voluntary medical student.

#2454

Marcelle Machluf

#20716

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Marcelle Machluf is an israeli biologist. Biography Machluf was born in Morocco and moved to Israel with her mother and grandmother when she was one year old. She grew up in Ashdod. Her mother supported the family as a seamstress and a cleaning lady.

#2455

Vernon Heywood

#61177

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Vernon Hilton Heywood was a British biologist. He specialised in medicinal and aromatic plants, and the conservation of wild relatives of plants. Heywood was appointed lecturer at University of Liverpool, UK in 1955, promoted to senior lecturer in 1960 and to reader in 1963. He was awarded the second established Chair in Botany in 1964 and left Liverpool in 1968.

#2456

Otto Thomas Solbrig

#59286

Overall Influence

1930 - 2023 (93 years)

Otto Thomas Solbrig was an Argentine evolutionary biologist and botanist. His research dealt with ecology and biodiversity of the Argentine and Uruguayan Pampas, Cerrado and sustainable agriculture.

#2457

Antony Stretton

#39804

Overall Influence

Antony "Tony" Oliver Ward Stretton is a neuroscientist, faculty member of the Neuroscience Training Program, and the John Bascom Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is married to fellow scientist, Philippa Claude, daughter of Albert Claude.

#2458

Elaine Mardis

#62278

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Elaine R. Mardis is the co-executive director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children's Hospital, where she also serves as the Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine. She also is professor of pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Mardis’s research focuses on the genomic characterization of cancer and its implications for cancer medicine. She was part of the team that reported the first next-generation-based sequencing of a whole cancer genome, and participated extensively in The Cancer Genome Atlas and the Pediatric Cancer Genome P...

#2459

Richard Green

#10749

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Richard Green was an American-British sexologist, psychiatrist, lawyer, and author known for his research on homosexuality and transsexualism, specifically gender identity disorder in children. He is known for his behaviorism experiment in which he attempted to prevent male homosexuality and transsexuality by extinguishing feminine behavior in young boys. He later came to favor biological explanations for male homosexuality.

#2460

David Penny

#36270

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Edward David Penny CNZM FRSNZ is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist from New Zealand. He has researched the nature of evolutionary transformations, and is widely published in the fields of phylogenetic tree, genetics and evolutionary biology. Penny's contributions to science have been recognised with several awards and honours, and acceptance into the National Academy of Sciences.

#2461

Marc Breedlove

#44990

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Stephen Marc Breedlove is the Barnett Rosenberg professor of Neuroscience at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. He was born and raised in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri. After graduating from Central High School in 1972, he earned a bachelor's degree in Psychology from Yale University in 1976, and a Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA in 1982. He was a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley from 1982 to 2003, moving to Michigan State in 2001. He works in the fields of Behavioral Neuroscience and Neuroendocrinology. He is a member of the Society f...

#2462

Helmut Lieth

#61341

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Friedrich Heinrich Helmut Lieth was a German ecologist, botanist and phytogeographer. Biography Lieth received his doctorate in Biology from the University of Cologne in 1953 and became a private lecturer at the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim in 1960. He was then visiting professor in Venezuela and Colombia, professor of botany at the University of Hawaii and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1977 to 1992 he was a professor at the University of Osnabrück where he held the chair for ecology.

#2463

Jean Edouard Frederic P. Rivier

#68138

Overall Influence

#2464

Robert Purcell

#65901

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Robert Harry Purcell is an American virologist and former co-chief of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. He is known for his work on hepatitis viruses, and was involved in identifying hepatitis A virus, hepatitis D virus, and hepatitis E virus, developing an animal model for hepatitis B, and developing the hepatitis A vaccine.

#2465

Douglas Inman

#52223

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

Douglas Lamar Inman was a Professor of Oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Born in Guam, the Marianas Islands, he received his B.A in physics/geology in 1942 from California State University, San Diego , his M.S. and Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research was done at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, under the direction of Francis Parker Shepard. His dissertation title was Areal and Seasonal Variations in Beach and Nearshore Sediments at La Jolla, California. He was a professor of marine geology or oceanography in the U...

#2466

David Tyrrell

#45333

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

David Arthur John Tyrrell was a British virologist who was the director of the Common Cold Unit, which investigated viruses that caused common colds. He discovered the first human coronavirus in 1965. With June Almeida he made the first comparative study of human and chicken coronaviruses in 1967, and invented the name coronavirus in 1968.

#2467

Lawrence B. Slobodkin

Lawrence B. Slobodkin

#39681

Overall Influence

1928 - 2009 (81 years)

Lawrence Basil Slobodkin was an American ecologist and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, State University of New York. He was one of the leading pioneers of modern ecology. His innovative thinking and research, provocative teaching, and visionary leadership helped transform ecology into a modern science, with deep links to evolution.

#2468

Dorothy Cheney

#32838

Overall Influence

1950 - 2018 (68 years)

Dorothy Leavitt Cheney was an American scientist who studied the social behavior, communication, and cognition of wild primates in their natural habitat. She was Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#2469

Michel Kazatchkine

Michel Kazatchkine

#20651

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Michel Kazatchkine is a French physician, diplomat and advocate who is best known for his work in international AIDS treatment issues. From February 2007 to March 2012 he was director of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. On July 20, 2012, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed him as his United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

#2470

Jane Maienschein

Jane Maienschein

#31259

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jane Maienschein is an American professor and director of the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. Education Maienschein was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later transferred to Yale University in 1969 where she was a member of Manuscript Society. In 1972, she graduated with honors in History, the Arts, and Letters. She then attended Indiana University to conduct her Ph.D work. Her mentor, Dr. Frederick Churchill, was interested in historical embryological research. Maienschein was awarded a Fellowship at the Smithsonian, to study the history of microscopy.

#2471

Christopher Chetsanga

#42628

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Christopher J. Chetsanga is a prominent Zimbabwean scientist who is a member of the African Academy of Sciences and The World Academy of Sciences. He discovered two enzymes involved in DNA repair. He has also held various academic administrative posts like Vice-Chancellor, Director and Dean.

#2472

David H. Raulet

#66454

Overall Influence

David H. Raulet is an immunologist who specializes in studying the role of natural killer cells. He is a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley where he also holds the Esther and Wendy Schekman Chair in cancer biology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. Raulet is also the co-founder of Dragonfly Therapeutics, a company that seeks to use natural killer cells for cancer immunotherapy.

#2473

Leonard I. Zon

#34696

Overall Influence

Leonard I. Zon, M.D., is the Grousbeck Professor of Pediatric Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Director of the Stem Cell Program, Children’s Hospital Boston.

#2474

Howard H. Pattee

Howard H. Pattee

#43811

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Howard Hunt Pattee is an American biologist, Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He graduated at Stanford University in 1948 and completed a Ph.D. there in 1953.

#2475

Rainer Froese

#28237

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Rainer Froese is a senior scientist at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, formerly the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences , and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. He obtained an MSc in Biology in 1985 at the University of Kiel and a PhD in Biology in 1990 from the University of Hamburg. Early in his career, he worked at the Institute of Marine Sciences on computer-aided identification systems and the life strategies of fish larvae. His current research interests include fish information systems, marine biodiversity, marine biogeography, and the population dynamics of fishe...

#2476

Gert Pfurtscheller

#68339

Overall Influence

#2477

Lida Holmes Mattman

#62775

Overall Influence

1912 - 2008 (96 years)

Lida Holmes Mattman Ph.D. was an immunologist. She graduated with a M.S. in Virology from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in Immunology from Yale University. Mattman taught in the fields of immunology, microbiology, bacteriology, virology and pathology for over 30 years. She worked at various schools and institutions including Harvard University, Howard Hughes Institute, Oakland University and Wayne State University. She was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences at Wayne State University in Detroit where she was engaged in research and lecturing. She has served...

#2478

Thomas Jenuwein

Thomas Jenuwein

#59607

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Thomas Jenuwein is a German scientist working in the fields of epigenetics, chromatin biology, gene regulation and genome function. Biography Thomas Jenuwein received his Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1987 from the EMBL, working on fos oncogenes in the laboratory of Rolf Müller and the University of Heidelberg and performed postdoctoral studies on the immunoglobulin heavy chain enhancer with Rudolf Grosschedl at the University of California San Francisco . As an independent group leader and then as a senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, he focused his research to chromatin regulation.

#2479

Sergei Netyosov

#44871

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Sergei Viktorovich Netyosov is a Russian molecular biologist, a specialist in virus genomes. Biography Sergei Netyosov was born on April 19, 1953, in Leninsk-Kuznetsky, Kemerovo Oblast. In 1975 he graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the Novosibirsk State University.

#2480

Charles R. Goldman

#46869

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Charles Remington Goldman is an American limnologist and ecologist. Education and career Goldman graduated from the University of Illinois with B.A. in geology in 1952 and M.S. in zoology in 1955. He received his Ph.D. in limnology-fisheries in 1958 from the University of Michigan. From 1957 to 1958 he was a Fisheries Research Biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska. At the University of California, Davis he became in 1958 an instructor and was promoted in 1966 to full professor of zoology. There he was from 1966 to 1969, and from 1990 to 1991 he was the founding director of the Institute of Ecology and from 1971 as Distinguished Professor of Limnology.

#2481

Peter J. Grubb

#60697

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Peter John Grubb is a British ecologist and emeritus professor of botany at Cambridge University. Early life Grubb was born on 9 August 1935 to Harold Amos Grubb and Phyllis Gertrude née Hook. He attended Royal Liberty School and then Magdalene College, Cambridge where he received his BA in 1957, his PhD in 1962, and his ScD in 1995. His Ph.D. was supervised by G. E. Briggs.

#2482

Mary Frances Lyon

#68409

Overall Influence

#2483

Andrew Spielman

#32731

Overall Influence

1930 - 2006 (76 years)

Andrew Spielman was a prominent American public health entomologist and Professor of Tropical Public Health in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health .

#2484

Robin Lovell-Badge

Robin Lovell-Badge

#52141

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Robin Howard Lovell-Badge, CBE, FRS FMedSci is a British scientist most famous for his discovery, along with Peter Goodfellow, of the SRY gene on the Y-chromosome that is the determinant of sex in mammals. They shared the 1995 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine for their discovery. He was awarded the 2022 Genetics Society Medal. He is currently a Senior Group Leader and Head of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics at the Francis Crick Institute in Central London.

#2485

Shiladitya DasSarma

#46074

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Shiladitya DasSarma is a molecular biologist well-known for contributions to the biology of halophilic and extremophilic microorganisms. He is a Professor in the University of Maryland Baltimore. He earned a PhD degree in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS degree in chemistry from Indiana University Bloomington. Prior to taking a faculty position, he conducted research at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Pasteur Institute, Paris.

#2486

Jordi Sabater Pi

Jordi Sabater Pi

#23088

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Jordi Sabater Pi was a Spanish primatologist and worldwide specialist in ethology, the study of animal behavior. Sabater was known for describing the cultural behaviors of several species, including the use of tools by chimpanzeess. During the 1960s, he purchased Snowflake, a very rare albino gorilla, and transported him to Barcelona Zoo, where he lived until his death in 2003.

#2487

Urs Leupold

#64251

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Urs Leupold was a Swiss geneticist whose studies of the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe were instrumental in establishing this organism as a key model system for eukaryotic cell and molecular biology. Leupold began his studies of S. pombe in 1946 upon encouragement by Øjvind Winge. In 1947, Leupold determined that a culture of S. pombe str. liquefaciens contained strains expressing four distinct mating types: h40, h90, h+, and h−. Most current S. pombe laboratory strains are derived from the h90, h+, and h− strains known as 968, 975, and 972.

#2488

Aaron M. Ellison

#59558

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Aaron M. Ellison is an American ecologist, photographer, sculptor, and writer. He retired in July 2021 after 20 years as the senior research fellow in ecology at Harvard University and as a Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest. He also served as deputy director of the Harvard Forest from 2018 to 2021. Until 2018, he also was an adjunct research professor at the University of Massachusetts in the Departments of Biology and Environmental Conservation. Ellison has both authored and co-authored numerous scientific papers, books, book reviews and software reviews. For more than 30 years, Ellison ...

#2489

Elizabeth Kujawinski

#44933

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Kujawinski is an American oceanographer who is Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where she works as Program Director of the Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet. Her research considers analytical chemistry, chemical oceanography, microbiology and microbial ecology. She is interested in what controls the composition of organic materials in aquatic systems.

#2490

Peter M. Howley

#61827

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Peter Maxwell Howley is an American pathologist, virologist, and professor at Harvard Medical School. He has been president of the American Society for Virology and the American Society for Investigative Pathology and a co-editor of the Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease.

#2491

Darren Tanke

#40794

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Darren H. Tanke is a Canadian fossil preparation technician of the Dinosaur Research Program at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta. Born in Calgary, Tanke became interested in natural history at an early age. In 1979, Tanke began working for Philip J. Currie in the paleontology department of the Provincial Museum of Alberta, originally as a volunteer. From 1979 until 2005 Tanke worked as a lab and field technician, a job he still holds today.

#2492

Gordon M. G. Shepherd

#68573

Overall Influence

#2493

Hartmut Karl Lichtenthaler

#68605

Overall Influence

#2494

Maria do Carmo Fonseca

#46965

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Maria do Carmo Fonseca is a Portuguese scientist, full professor of Molecular Cell Biology and Onco-biology at the University of Lisbon Medical School and president of the Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes .

#2495

Lawrence M. Lichtenstein

#68636

Overall Influence

#2496

Charles C. Richardson

#48004

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Charles Clifton Richardson is an American biochemist and professor at Harvard University. Richardson received his undergraduate education at Duke University, where he majored in medicine. He received his M.D. at Duke Medical School in 1960. Richardson works as a professor at Harvard Medical School, and he served as editor/associate editor of the Annual Review of Biochemistry from 1972 to 2003. Richardson received the American Chemical Society Award in Biological Chemistry in 1968, as well as numerous other accolades.

#2497

Mahlon Hoagland

#37248

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Mahlon Bush Hoagland was an American biochemist who discovered transfer RNA , the translator of the genetic code. Biography Early life Mahlon Bush Hoagland was born in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. in 1921 to Hudson Hoagland and Anna Hoagland. Hudson was an American physiologist who was known for co-founding the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology with Gregory Pincus. He graduated from The Hill School in 1940 and attended Williams College, and in 1948 received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School with intentions of becoming a pediatric surgeon. After a bout with tuberculosis, Hoaglan...

#2498

Jon Driver

#41360

Overall Influence

1962 - 2011 (49 years)

Jonathon Stevens "Jon Driver" was a psychologist and neuroscientist. He was a leading figure in the study of perception, selective attention and multisensory integration in the normal and damaged human brain.

#2499

Josephine Pemberton

Josephine Pemberton

#62358

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Josephine M. Pemberton is a British evolutionary biologist. She is Chair of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, where she conducts research in parentage analysis, pedigree reconstruction, inbreeding depression, parasite resistance, and quantitative trait locus detection in natural populations. She has worked primarily on long-term studies of soay sheep on St Kilda, and red deer on the island of Rùm.

#2500

James Hanken

#55407

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

James Hanken is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University as well as the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Hanken received his bachelor's degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He then did post-doctoral research at Dalhousie University before joining the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1999.

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