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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#2501

Petra Levin

#43293

Overall Influence

Petra Anne Levin is an American microbiologist. She is a professor in the department of biology and co-director of the Plant and Microbial Biosciences Graduate Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

#2502

Tobias Walther

#63176

Overall Influence

Tobias C. Walther is the chair of the cell biology program at Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City and a professor at Weill Cornell School of Medicine, where he co-directs the Farese and Walther lab. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2015. His primary responsibilities are to provide leadership in research and teaching in the scientific fields of metabolism, membrane biology and lipids.

#2503

Peter Becker

#39595

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Peter Becker is a German molecular biologist. He studied biology at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg until 1984 and finished his Ph.D at the German Cancer Research Center and the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg in 1987. After being employed at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory from 1991 until 1999 he became head of the Adolf Butenandt Institute for molecular biology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#2504

Albert Gjedde

#32806

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Albert Gjedde: is a Danish-Canadian neuroscientist. He is Professor of Neurobiology and Pharmacology at the Faculty of Health Sciences and Center of Neuroscience at the University of Copenhagen. He is currently also Adjunct Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery in the Department of Neurology, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Adjunct Professor of Radiology and Radiological Science in the Division of Nuclear Medicine, Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, US, Adjunct Professor of Translation...

#2505

Gabriel Waksman

#58622

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Gabriel Waksman FMedSci, FRS, is Courtauld professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at University College London , and professor of structural and molecular biology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the director of the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology at UCL and Birkbeck, head of the Department of Structural and Molecular Biology at UCL, and head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Birkbeck.

#2506

Didier Pittet

#44157

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Didier Pittet is an infectious diseases expert and the director of the Infection Control Programme and WHO Collaborating Centre on Patient Safety, University Hospital of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2005, Pittet is also the External Lead of the World Health Organization Global Patient Safety Challenge "Clean Care is Safer Care" and African Partnerships for Patient Safety.

#2507

Oswald Tippo

#53552

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Oswald Tippo was an American botanist and educator. Tippo became the first chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. Career Born in Milo, Tippo moved to Boston a year later, and graduated from Jamaica Plain High School in 1928. He received his Bachelor of Science in botany from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University . He was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst . Tippo was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi honor societies.

#2508

Theo Colborn

#19684

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Theodora Emily Colborn was Founder and President Emerita of The Endocrine Disruption Exchange , based in Paonia, Colorado, and Professor Emerita of Zoology at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She was an environmental health analyst, and best known for her studies on the health effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals. She died in 2014.

#2509

Johannes Krause

Johannes Krause

#30039

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Johannes Krause is a German biochemist with a research focus on historical infectious diseases and human evolution. Since 2010, he has been professor of archaeology and paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen. In 2014, Krause was named a founding co-director of the new Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.

#2510

Barry H. Honig

#50122

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Barry H. Honig is an American biochemist, molecular biophysicist, and computational biophysicist, who develops theoretical methods and computer software for "analyzing the structure and function of biological macromolecules."

#2511

Adolfo García-Sastre

#67812

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Adolfo García-Sastre, is a Spanish professor of Medicine and Microbiology and co-director of the Global Health & Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. His research into the biology of influenza viruses has been at the forefront of medical advances in epidemiology.

#2512

Irving Gottesman

Irving Gottesman

#39575

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Irving Isadore Gottesman was an American professor of psychology who devoted most of his career to the study of the genetics of schizophrenia. He wrote 17 books and more than 290 other publications, mostly on schizophrenia and behavioral genetics, and created the first academic program on behavioral genetics in the United States. He won awards such as the Hofheimer Prize for Research, the highest award from the American Psychiatric Association for psychiatric research. Lastly, Gottesman was a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D.

#2513

Janet Iwasa

#39322

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Janet Iwasa is an American data visualization expert and assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah. Early life and education In 1978, Janet Iwasa was born to parents Mikeko and Kuni Iwasa in Bloomington, Indiana. She was the youngest of three children. Following her father joining the National Institutes of Health, she moved, with her family, to Maryland. She later went on to participate in an internship at the Institute for Genomic Research.

#2514

James B. McClintock

James B. McClintock

#61722

Overall Influence

James B. McClintock is an American professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and studies various aspects of marine biology in Antarctica. He is an authority on the effects of climate change in Antarctica which is detailed in his book Lost Antarctica – Adventures in a Disappearing Land,.

#2515

Nina Kraus

#58634

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Nina Kraus is a professor at Northwestern University, investigating the neural encoding of speech and music and its plasticity where she is the Hugh S. Knowles Chair. Her Auditory Neuroscience Lab, also known as Brainvolts, examines the biological processing of sound throughout the life span, how it is disrupted in clinical populations , and how it reacts to differing levels of expertise . Her work has shown that the hearing brain is vast—engaging our cognitive, sensory, motor, and reward networks. This perspective is illustrated in her book Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World.

#2516

Roy John Britten

#56204

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Roy John Britten was an American molecular biologist known for his discovery of repeated DNA sequences in the genomes of eukaryotic organisms, and later on the evolution of the genome. Early life and education Roy Britten was born in Washington, D.C. He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto, Ontario, and then went to the University of Virginia to study physics. He enrolled at Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student in physics in 1940. At the beginning of World War II, he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. In 1951, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His Ph.D.

#2517

Kevin David Hyde

#68956

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#2518

Earl P. Benditt

#62663

Overall Influence

1916 - 1996 (80 years)

Earl Philip Benditt was an American pathologist, known for his research on hardening of the arteries. Benditt was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Benditt published approximately 250 scientific papers. Benditt was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a recipient of the Rous-Whipple Award as well as the Gold-Headed Cane from the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists. Benditt was the Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Washington from 1957 to 1981. The National Academies Press called him "a preeminent twentieth-century experimental pathologist".

#2519

Jan Karlseder

#53405

Overall Influence

Jan Karlseder is an Austrian molecular biologist, a professor in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research and the holder of the Donald and Darlene Shiley Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

#2520

Thomas W. Schoener

#69001

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Thomas William Schoener is an American ecologist and professor at University of California, Davis. In 1969, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he was a Junior Fellow. He served on the faculty at the University of Washington before moving to Davis. He is an expert in community ecology and in evolutionary ecology, including experimental manipulation of island vertebrate and spider communities. Dr. Schoener's research has been both theoretical and empirical.

#2521

Timothy R. McClanahan

#55959

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Timothy R. McClanahan is a biologist and a senior conservation zoologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and is known for his work on the ecology of coral reefs. He lives and works in Mombasa, Kenya, where he studies the marine tropical ecosystems of the western Indian Ocean, and is the director of the WCS coral reefs program for eastern Africa.

#2522

Robert Seyfarth

#35489

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Robert M. Seyfarth is an American primatologist and author. With his wife and collaborator Dorothy L. Cheney, he spent years studying the social behavior, communication, and cognition of wild primates in their natural habitat, including more than a decade of field work with baboons in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. Seyfarth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement, is a member of both the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#2523

Lin Chao

#32042

Overall Influence

Lin Chao is a Chinese Brazilian American evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Chao gained his PhD in 1977 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as a student of Bruce R. Levin , and was a NIH postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the laboratory of Edward C. Cox. He spent most of his career in the Department of Biology of the University of Maryland, College Park and is currently at the Ecology, Behavior and Evolution Section of the University of California, San Diego.

#2524

Louis Sokoloff

#25980

Overall Influence

1921 - 2015 (94 years)

Louis Sokoloff was an American neuroscientist. He is considered to be a pioneer in functional imaging of the brain. Louis Sokoloff was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences from 1980. In 1981, he received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. In 1987, he received the Karl Spencer Lashley Award; "For his elucidation of the physiological and biochemical processes involved in the metabolism of the brain and the application of these discoveries to the measurement of functional activity within that organ". In 1988, Sokoloff, together with Seymour S.

#2525

Jorge O. Calvo

#51918

Overall Influence

1961 - 2023 (62 years)

Jorge Orlando Calvo was an Argentine geologist and paleontologist working for "Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas Lago Barreales" . Life and career Jorge Orlando Calvo was born in Córdoba, Argentina, on 27 April 1961. He was a professor in Geology and Paleontology at the National University of Comahue, Neuquén. He was one of the founders of the Geology Career at this university as well as the Director of the Barreales Lake Paleontological Center.

#2526

Jeremy Nathans

#48005

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jeremy Nathans is a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

#2527

John Brookfield

#67667

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

John Brookfield, , is a British population geneticist. He is Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the University of Nottingham, in the School of Biology. Research summary Brookfield is interested in how the genome evolves and has recently focussed on the evolution of DNA sequences which control development, particularly in Drosophila, and on the evolution of transposable elements.

#2528

Dorothy Otnow Lewis

#5895

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Dorothy Otnow Lewis is an American psychiatrist and author who has been an expert witness at a number of high-profile cases. She specializes in the study of violent individuals and people with dissociative identity disorder , formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Lewis has worked with death row inmates as well as other prison inmates convicted for crimes of passion and violence, and was the director of the DID clinic at Bellevue Hospital, associated with New York University in New York City. She is a professor of psychiatry at Yale and New York University and is the author of Guilty...

#2529

Fakhri A. Bazzaz

#12093

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

Professor Fakhri Al-Bazzaz was an Iraqi-American plant ecologist specializing in the study of plant community ecological succession. A professor and prolific author, he was ranked amongst the top ten "Most Cited Scientists in Environment/Ecology, 1992–2002".

#2530

Max Dale Cooper

Max Dale Cooper

#38777

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Max Dale Cooper , is an American immunologist and a professor at the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Emory Vaccine Center of Emory University School of Medicine. He is known for characterizing T cells and B cells.

#2531

Margaret Buckingham

#40373

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Margaret Buckingham, is a British developmental biologist working in the fields of myogenesis and cardiogenesis. She is an honorary professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and emeritus director in the Centre national de la recherche scientifique . She is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Academia Europaea and the French Academy of Sciences.

#2532

Clinton Ballou

#36032

Overall Influence

1923 - 2021 (98 years)

Clinton Edward Ballou was an American academic who was a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focused on the metabolism of carbohydrates and the structures of microbial cell walls. He joined the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1975.

#2533

Stacey Gabriel

#51375

Overall Influence

Stacey B. Gabriel is an American geneticist and Senior Director of the Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute. With Eric Lander, she is also the co-director of the National Human Genome Research Institute's sequencing center at the Broad Institute. She was named the "hottest researcher" on Thomson Reuters' list of the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014. She was given this honor because she published twenty-three of the most cited papers of 2013, more than any other single researcher recorded by Thomson Reuters. She topped the same list again in 2015. She is also an ISI Highly ...

#2534

Philip Donoghue

Philip Donoghue

#53545

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Philip Conrad James Donoghue FRS is a British palaeontologist and Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol. Education Donoghue was educated at the University of Leicester where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in geology in 1992 and PhD in Paleontology in 1997 for research supervised by Richard Aldridge and Mark Purnell. He also holds a Master of Science degree in palynology from the University of Sheffield.

#2535

Perminder Sachdev

#56798

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Perminder Sachdev is an Indian neuropsychiatrist based in Australia. He is a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of New South Wales , co-director of the UNSW Centre for Healthy Brain Aging, and clinical director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney. He is considered a trailblazer in the field of neuropsychiatry. Sachdev's research interests include ageing, vascular cognitive disorders such as vascular dementia, and psychiatric disorders.

#2536

Richard I. Morimoto

#51212

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Richard I. Morimoto is a Japanese American molecular biologist. He is the Bill and Gayle Cook Professor of Biology and Director of the Rice Institute for Biomedical Research at Northwestern University.

#2537

Matthew Jebb

#53063

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Matthew Hilary Peter Jebb is an Irish botanist and taxonomist specialising in the ant plant genera Squamellaria, Myrmecodia, Hydnophytum, Myrmephytum and Anthorrhiza, as well as the carnivorous plant genus Nepenthes.

#2538

Michael Berk

#69247

Overall Influence

#2539

Alison Gail Smith

#54752

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Alison Gail Smith, Lady Hopper is Professor of Plant Biochemistry in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research investigates the metabolism of plants, algae and bacteria, in particular vitamin and cofactor biosynthesis.

#2540

Karin Lochte

#65205

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Karin Lochte is a German oceanographer, researcher, and climate change specialist. She was director of German Polar Research Alfred Wegener Institute from 2007 to 2017 as well as chairman of the management committee of Jacobs University Bremen.

#2541

Eric L. Schwartz

#27336

Overall Influence

1947 - 2018 (71 years)

Eric L. Schwartz was Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Boston University. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

#2542

Roger Butlin

#65977

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Roger Kenneth Butlin is a British evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on speciation. He served as Editor of Heredity from 2009 to 2012, and President of the Society for the Study of Evolution from 2013 to 2015. In 2015 he received the Darwin Wallace Medal.

#2543

Rohan Pethiyagoda

Rohan Pethiyagoda

#28698

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Rohan David Pethiyagoda is a Sri Lankan biodiversity scientist, amphibian and freshwater-fish taxonomist, author, conservationist and public-policy advocate. Early life and career Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on 19 November 1955 Pethiyagoda had his secondary education at S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia. He was awarded a BSc Hons. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from King's College, University of London in 1977, and a M.Phil. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Sussex in 1980.

#2544

Paul Talalay

#44926

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

Paul Talalay was the John Jacob Abel Distinguished Service Professor of Pharmacology and director of the Laboratory for Molecular Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. He was the founder of the Brassica Chemoprotection Laboratory for the study of edible plants that induce protective enzyme activity in the body and may help prevent the development of cancer.

#2545

Saul Roseman

#60615

Overall Influence

1921 - 2011 (90 years)

Saul Roseman was an American biochemist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Among many discoveries related to carbohydrate biochemistry, he discovered the phosphotransferase system in bacteria.

#2546

John Birks

#64810

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Harry John Betteley Birks is a botanist and emeritus professor at the University of Bergen and University College London. He is best known for his work on the development of quantitative techniques in Quaternary palaeoecology. He has researched the vegetational and environmental history over the past 10–20,000 years in many parts of the world, including Fennoscandia, UK, Minnesota, the Yukon, Siberia, and Tibet.

#2547

Gordon M. Shepherd

#40289

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Gordon Murray Shepherd was an American neuroscientist who carried out basic experimental and computational research on how neurons are organized into microcircuits to carry out the functional operations of the nervous system. Using the olfactory system as a model that spans multiple levels of space, time and disciplines, his studies ranged from molecular to behavioral, recognized by an annual lecture at Yale University on "integrative neuroscience". At the time of his death, he was professor of neuroscience emeritus at the Yale School of Medicine. He graduated from Iowa State University with ...

#2548

Harold Knox Pender Mcilwain

#69331

Overall Influence

#2549

Denis Le Bihan

#37898

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Denis Le Bihan is a medical doctor, physicist, member of the Institut de France , member of the French Academy of Technologies and director since 2007 of NeuroSpin, an institution of the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energy Commission in Saclay, dedicated to the study of the brain by magnetic resonance imaging with a very high magnetic field. Denis Le Bihan has received international recognition for his outstanding work, introducing new imaging methods, particularly for the study of the human brain, as evidenced by the many international awards he has received, such as the Gold Medal of the...

#2550

Herbert Tabor

#47939

Overall Influence

1918 - 2020 (102 years)

Herbert Tabor was an American biochemist and physician-scientist who specialized in the function of polyamines and their role in human health and disease. Tabor was a principal investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases where he was Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biological Chemistry from 1971 to 2010.

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