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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Biology,
#251
Andrew Schally
#3866
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Andrzej Viktor "Andrew" Schally is an American endocrinologist of Polish ancestry, who was a corecipient, with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This award recognized his research in the discovery that the hypothalamus controls hormone production and release by the pituitary gland, which controls the regulation of other hormones in the body. Later in life, Schally utilized his knowledge of hypothalamic hormones to research possible methods for birth control and cancer treatment.
Go to Profile#252
Ken Wilber
#280
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Kenneth Earl Wilber II is an American theorist and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a four-quadrant grid which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience.
Go to Profile#253
Donald Prothero
#6431
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Donald Ross Prothero is an American geologist, paleontologist, and author who specializes in mammalian paleontology and magnetostratigraphy, a technique to date rock layers of the Cenozoic era and its use to date the climate changes which occurred 30–40 million years ago. He is the author or editor of more than 30 books and over 300 scientific papers, including at least 5 geology textbooks.
Go to Profile#254
Rick Strassman
#4294
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Rick Strassman is an American clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He has held a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California San Diego and was Professor of Psychiatry for eleven years at the University of New Mexico. After 20 years of intermission, Strassman was the first person in the United States to undertake human research with psychedelic, hallucinogenic, or entheogenic substances with his research on N,N-dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT. He is also the author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule,...
Go to Profile#255
A. W. F. Edwards
#3979
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. He has sometimes been called "Fisher's Edwards" to distinguish him from his brother, because he was mentored by Ronald Fisher. Edwards has always had a high regard for Fisher's scientific contributions and has written extensively on them. To mark the Fisher centenary in 1990, Edwards proposed a commemorative Sir Ronald Fisher window be installed in the Dining Hall of Gonville & Caius College. ...
Go to Profile#256
Robin Warren
#2241
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
John Robin Warren is an Australian pathologist, Nobel Laureate and researcher who is credited with the 1979 re-discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, together with Barry Marshall. The duo proved to the medical community that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers.
Go to Profile#257
Paulien Hogeweg
#6614
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Paulien Hogeweg is a Dutch theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher studying biological systems as dynamic information processing systems at many interconnected levels. In 1970, together with Ben Hesper, she defined the term bioinformatics as "the study of informatic processes in biotic systems".
Go to Profile#258
Howard Martin Temin
#5035
Overall Influence
1934 - 1994 (60 years)
Howard Martin Temin was an American geneticist and virologist. He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for which he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco and David Baltimore.
Go to Profile#259
Michael Rutter
#1823
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Sir Michael Llewellyn Rutter CBE FRS FRCP FRCPsych FMedSci was the first person to be appointed professor of child psychiatry in the United Kingdom. He has been described as the "father of child psychiatry". Rutter was professor of developmental psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London and consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, a post he held since 1966, until retiring in July 2021. A survey published in Review of General Psychology in 2002 ranked Rutter as the 68th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He died of cancer on October 23, 2021, aged...
Go to Profile#260
Daniel Pauly
#5478
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Pauly is a French-born marine biologist, well known for his work in studying human impacts on global fisheries and in 2020 was the most cited fisheries scientist in the world. He is a professor and the project leader of the Sea Around Us Project at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. He also served as Director of the UBC Fisheries Centre from November 2003 to October 2008.
Go to Profile#261
James V. Neel
#4757
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
James Van Gundia Neel was an American geneticist who played a key role in the development of human genetics as a field of research in the United States. He made important contributions to the emergence of genetic epidemiology and pursued an understanding of the influence of environment on genes. In his early work, he studied sickle-cell disease and thalassemia conducted research on the effects of radiation on survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
Go to Profile#262
Detlef Weigel
#9673
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Detlef Weigel is a German American scientist working at the interface of developmental and evolutionary biology. Education Weigel was an undergraduate in biology and chemistry at the universities of Bielefeld and Cologne. In 1986, he graduated with a Diploma in biology for this thesis on Drosophila neurogenesis with the late José Campos-Ortega. In 1988, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. During his PhD work with , he discovered the founding member of an important class of transcription factors, the Forkhead/FOX proteins. In 1988, he graduated with a Ph...
Go to Profile#263
Marc Kirschner
#10628
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Marc Wallace Kirschner is an American cell biologist and biochemist and the founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He is known for major discoveries in cell and developmental biology related to the dynamics and function of the cytoskeleton, the regulation of the cell cycle, and the process of signaling in embryos, as well as the evolution of the vertebrate body plan. He is a leader in applying mathematical approaches to biology. He is the John Franklin Enders University Professor at Harvard University. In 2021 he was elected to the American Philosophica...
Go to Profile#264
Gunther Stent
#8940
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Gunther S. Stent was Graduate Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the early bacteriophage biologists, he was known also for his studies on the metabolism of bacteria and neurobiology of leeches, and for his writing on the history and philosophy of biology.
Go to Profile#265
Michael Ghiselin
#5165
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael T. Ghiselin is an American biologist and philosopher as well as historian of biology, formerly at the California Academy of Sciences. He is known for his work concerning sea slugs, and for his criticism of the falsification of the history of Lamarckism in biology textbooks.
Go to Profile#266
Victor Ambros
#8883
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Victor R. Ambros is an American developmental biologist who discovered the first known microRNA . He is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. Background Ambros was born in New Hampshire. His father was a Polish war refugee and Victor grew up on a small dairy farm in Hartland, Vermont in a family of eight children, and went to school at Woodstock Union High School. He received his BS in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and completed his PhD in 1979 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Nobel laureate David Baltimore.
Go to Profile#267
Jerome Lettvin
#1144
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Jerome Ysroael Lettvin , often known as Jerry Lettvin, was an American cognitive scientist, and Professor of Electrical and Bioengineering and Communications Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is best known as the lead author of the paper, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" , one of the most cited papers in the Science Citation Index. He wrote it along with Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, and in the paper they gave special thanks and mention to Oliver Selfridge at MIT. Lettvin carried out neurophysiological studies in the spinal cord, m...
Go to Profile#268
Franklin Stahl
#7470
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Franklin William Stahl is an American molecular biologist and geneticist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment showing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for production of a new strand.
Go to Profile#269
Georges J. F. Köhler
#9155
Overall Influence
1946 - 1995 (49 years)
Georges Jean Franz Köhler was a German biologist. Together with César Milstein and Niels Kaj Jerne, Köhler won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984, "for work on the immune system and the production of monoclonal antibodies". Milstein and Köhler's technique for producing monoclonal antibodies laid the foundation for the exploitation of antibodies for diagnostics, therapeutics and many other scientific applications.
Go to Profile#270
Edward Abraham
#3903
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Sir Edward Penley Abraham, was an English biochemist instrumental in the development of the first antibiotics penicillin and cephalosporin. Early life and education Abraham was born on 10 June 1913 at 47 South View Road, Shirley, Southampton. From 1924 Abraham attended King Edward VI School, Southampton, before achieving a First in Chemistry at The Queen's College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#271
Pasko Rakic
#5713
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Pasko Rakic is a Yugoslav-born American neuroscientist, who presently works in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience in New Haven, Connecticut. His main research interest is in the development and evolution of the human brain. He was the founder and served as Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at Yale, and was founder and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. He is best known for elucidating the mechanisms involved in development and evolution of the cerebral cortex. In 2008, Rakic shared the inaugural Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. He is currently the D...
Go to Profile#272
Lior Pachter
#5704
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Lior Samuel Pachter is a computational biologist. He works at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the Bren Professor of Computational Biology. He has widely varied research interests including genomics, combinatorics, computational geometry, machine learning, scientific computing, and statistics.
Go to Profile#273
Alice S. Huang
#6526
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Alice S. Huang Early years Alice Huang's father, Quentin K. Y. Huang, was orphaned at age 12 in Anhui, China and was taken in by a missionary. He was later educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Divinity School, returning to China as an Anglican bishop. He later married Huang's mother, Grace Betty Soong.
Go to Profile#274
Neil Shubin
#7064
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Neil Shubin is an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer. He is the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, Associate Dean of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Professor on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago along with being the Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History. He is best known for his co-discovery of Tiktaalik roseae with Ted Daeschler and Farish Jenkins.
Go to Profile#275
Frederick Alt
#8194
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Frederick W. Alt is an American geneticist. He is a member of the Immunology section of the National Academy of Sciences and a Charles A. Janeway Professor of Pediatrics, and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is the Director of the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Boston Children's Hospital. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, since 1987.
Go to Profile#276
G. K. Podila
#12840
Overall Influence
1957 - 2010 (53 years)
Gopi K. Podila was an Indian–American biologist who served as a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He was one of three faculty members killed in a mass shooting at the university on February 12, 2010. Podila was chairperson of the university's department of biological sciences, with a particular interest in the ecology of Populus and their mycorrhizal symbionts.
Go to Profile#277
Thomas Szasz
#195
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Thomas Stephen Szasz was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism.
Go to Profile#278
William C. Campbell
#2496
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
William Cecil Campbell is an Irish biologist and parasitologist with United States citizenship, known for his work in discovering a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworms, for which he was jointly awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to discover a class of drugs called avermectins, whose derivatives have been shown to have "extraordinary efficacy" in treating River blindness and Lymphatic filariasis, among other parasitic diseases affecting animals and humans. Campbell worked at the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research 1957–1990, and is currentl...
Go to Profile#279
Kenneth V. Thimann
#9428
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Kenneth Vivian Thimann was an English-American plant physiologist and microbiologist known for his studies of plant hormones, which were widely influential in agriculture and horticulture. He isolated and determined the structure of auxin, the first known plant hormone. He spent most of his early career at Harvard University, and his later career at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Go to Profile#280
Richard Wrangham
#3662
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Richard Walter Wrangham is an English anthropologist and primatologist; he is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His research and writing have involved ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking.
Go to Profile#281
Tomas Lindahl
#2723
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Tomas Robert Lindahl FRS FMedSci is a Swedish-British scientist specialising in cancer research. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with American chemist Paul L. Modrich and Turkish chemist Aziz Sancar for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.
Go to Profile#282
Irwin Rose
#2860
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Irwin Allan Rose was an American biologist. Along with Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
Go to Profile#283
Roger Revelle
#2594
Overall Influence
1909 - 1991 (82 years)
Roger Randall Dougan Revelle was a scientist and scholar who was instrumental in the formative years of the University of California, San Diego and was among the early scientists to study anthropogenic global warming, as well as the movement of Earth's tectonic plates. UC San Diego's first college is named Revelle College in his honor.
Go to Profile#284
Rolf M. Zinkernagel
#4048
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Rolf Martin Zinkernagel AC is a professor of experimental immunology at the University of Zurich. Along with Peter C. Doherty, he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells.
Go to Profile#285
Samer Hattar
#6223
Overall Influence
Samer Hattar is a chronobiologist and a leader in the field of non-image forming photoreception. He is the Chief of the Section on Light and Circadian Rhythms at the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health. He was previously an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. He is best known for his investigation into the role of melanopsin and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in the entrainment of circadian rhythms.
Go to Profile#286
Roger D. Kornberg
#3177
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roger David Kornberg is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA, "the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."
Go to Profile#287
Roy Mackal
#17600
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Roy P. Mackal was a University of Chicago biologist best known to the general public for his interest in cryptozoology. Academic background Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1925, Mackal served in the United States Marine Corps during World War II before attending the University of Chicago, where he received his B.S. in 1949 and his Ph.D under the direction of Lloyd Kozloff. in 1953. He spent the rest of his academic career with Chicago as an educator and researcher. Much of his early research with the university was in biochemistry and virology, and during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he cont...
Go to Profile#288
Gary Ruvkun
#8665
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gary Bruce Ruvkun is an American molecular biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Ruvkun discovered the mechanism by which lin-4, the first microRNA discovered by Victor Ambros, regulates the translation of target messenger RNAs via imperfect base-pairing to those targets, and discovered the second miRNA, let-7, and that it is conserved across animal phylogeny, including in humans. These miRNA discoveries revealed a new world of RNA regulation at an unprecedented small size scale, and the mechanism of that regulation. Ruv...
Go to Profile#289
Karl Deisseroth
#5440
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Karl Alexander Deisseroth is an American scientist. He is the D.H. Chen Professor of Bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. He is known for creating and developing the technologies of hydrogel-tissue chemistry and optogenetics, and for applying integrated optical and genetic strategies to study normal neural circuit function, as well as dysfunction in neurological and psychiatric disease.
Go to Profile#290
Alexander Varshavsky
#8235
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alexander J. Varshavsky is a Russian-American biochemist and geneticist. He works at the California Institute of Technology as the Morgan Professor of Biology. Varshavsky left Russia in 1977, emigrating to United States.
Go to Profile#291
Ewan Birney
#8754
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute , in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory . He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Tru...
Go to Profile#292
Robert L. Carroll
#9460
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Robert "Bob" Lynn Carroll was an American–Canadian vertebrate paleontologist who specialised in Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians and reptiles. Biography Carroll was an only child and grew up on a farm near Lansing, Michigan. He was introduced to paleontology by his father shortly after his fifth birthday, and by the time he was eight he had decided he wanted to be a vertebrate paleontologist. In that same year he received as a Christmas present the left femur of an Allosaurus, courtesy of Edwin H. Colbert, whom his father had told about his interest. In his teen years his parents took him...
Go to Profile#293
Gerald Fink
#8973
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Gerald Ralph Fink is an American biologist, who was Director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT from 1990–2001. He graduated from Amherst College in 1962 and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965, having elucidated the histidine pathway in budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. After postdoctoral study at the National Institutes of Health with Bruce Ames on the regulation of the histidine operon of Salmonella, in 1967 he joined Cornell University where he became a Professor of Genetics and pursued the study of the HIS4 region of yeast. In 1982 he became a founding member of the Whitehead Institute and Professor of Genetics at MIT.
Go to Profile#294
Emile Zuckerkandl
#8232
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Émile Zuckerkandl was an Austrian-born French biologist considered one of the founders of the field of molecular evolution. He introduced, with Linus Pauling, the concept of the "molecular clock", which enabled the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Go to Profile#295
Francisco Mojica
#7083
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica is a Spanish molecular biologist and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain. He is known for his discovery of repetitive, functional DNA sequences in bacteria which he named CRISPR . These were later developed into the first widespread genome editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9.
Go to Profile#296
Charles Yanofsky
#11272
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Charles Yanofsky was an American geneticist on the faculty of Stanford University who contributed to the establishment of the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis and discovered attenuation, a riboswitch mechanism in which messenger RNA changes shape in response to a small molecule and thus alters its binding ability for the regulatory region of a gene or operon.
Go to Profile#297
Klaus Hasselmann
#2436
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Klaus Ferdinand Hasselmann is a German oceanographer and climate modeller. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hamburg and former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi.
Go to Profile#298
George Monbiot
#478
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and is the author of a number of books. Monbiot grew up in Oxfordshire and studied zoology at the University of Oxford. He then began a career in investigative journalism, publishing his first book Poisoned Arrows in 1989 about human rights issues in West Papua. In later years, he has been involved in activism and advocacy related to various issues, such as climate change, British politics and loneliness. In Feral , he discussed and endorsed expansion of rewilding.
Go to Profile#299
Cornelia Bargmann
#7759
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Cornelia Isabella "Cori" Bargmann is an American neurobiologist. She is known for her work on the genetic and neural circuit mechanisms of behavior using C. elegans, particularly the mechanisms of olfaction in the worm. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and had been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016. She was the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from 2016 to 2022. In 2012 she was awarded the $1 million Kavli Prize, and in 2013 the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Go to Profile#300
Patricia Jacobs
#5455
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Patricia Ann Jacobs OBE FRSE FRS FMedSci FRCPath is a Scottish geneticist and is Honorary Professor of Human Genetics, Co-director of Research, Wessex Regional Genetics Laboratory, within the University of Southampton.
Go to Profile