The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#2551
Bridget Ogilvie
#30787
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Dame Bridget Margaret Ogilvie, is an Australian and British scientist. Education Ogilvie was born in 1938 at Glen Innes, New South Wales, Australia, to John Mylne and Margaret Beryl Ogilvie. During her primary school years, she had a single teacher, and three other students in her class.
Go to Profile#2552
Eugene c. Butcher
#69393
Overall Influence
#2553
Edward Adelson
#29114
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Edward Howard Adelson is an American neuroscientist who is currently the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#2554
Joe Roman
#39771
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, academic, and author of the books Whale and Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act. His conservation research includes studies of the historical population size of whales, the role of cetaceans in the nitrogen cycle, the relationship between biodiversity and disease, and the genetics of invasions. He is the founding editor of "Eat the Invaders", a website dedicated to controlling invasive species by eating them.
Go to Profile#2555
Wendy Raymond
#54059
Overall Influence
Wendy Raymond is the 16th President of Haverford College. She was formerly Vice President for Academic Affairs/Dean of Faculty and a professor of biology at Davidson College. Her research focus is molecular genetics.
Go to Profile#2556
Serge Daan
#57761
Overall Influence
1940 - 2018 (78 years)
Serge Daan was a Dutch scientist, known for his significant contributions to the field of Chronobiology. Early life and education Serge Daan was born in a wind mill, grew up in the Dutch countryside, and went to high school in Deventer. The Daan family was highly interested in biology and undertook enterprises in this field, such as investigating the ecology of reptiles in the Mediterranean area. As a consequence of this interest, Serge studied biology at the University of Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#2557
Lewis E. Kay
#58227
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lewis Edward Kay, is a Canadian academic and biochemist known for his research in biochemistry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for the studies of the structure and behaviour of proteins. He is a professor of molecular genetics, biochemistry and chemistry at the University of Toronto and Senior Scientist in Molecular Medicine at The Hospital for Sick Children.
Go to Profile#2558
Emma Johnston
#35076
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Emma Letitia Johnston is the Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Sydney. She was former, Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales and President of Science & Technology Australia. She is an authority in marine ecology and a former Pro Vice-Chancellor at UNSW.
Go to Profile#2559
Arul Chinnaiyan
#54939
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Arul M. Chinnaiyan is a Hicks Endowed Professor of Pathology and professor of pathology and urology at the University of Michigan Medical School. He is also a Howard Hughes medical Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Go to Profile#2560
Mark Geier
#20329
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Mark R. Geier is an American former physician and controversial professional witness who testified in more than 90 cases regarding allegations of injury or illness caused by vaccines. Since 2011, Geier's medical license has been suspended or revoked in every state in which he was licensed over concerns about his autism treatments and his misrepresentation of his credentials to the Maryland Board of Health, where he falsely claimed to be a board-certified geneticist and epidemiologist.
Go to Profile#2561
Virginia M.‐y. Lee
#69523
Overall Influence
#2562
Carlos A. Peres
#57108
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Carlos Augusto Peres is a Brazilian field biologist and conservation biologist who works in the Amazon rainforest and other neotropical forest regions on questions involving wildlife and biological conservation. His research interests are in the large-scale patterns of large-bodied vertebrate diversity and abundance in Amazonian forests; the effects of different forms on human disturbance, including hunting, habitat fragmentation and wildfires, on Amazonian forest vertebrates; and reserve selection and design criteria in relation to regional gradients of biodiversity value and implementation costs.
Go to Profile#2563
Maria Manuel Mota
#45695
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Maria Manuel Mota is a Portuguese malariologist and executive director of the Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes, Lisbon. Education Maria Mota, a native of Vila Nova de Gaia, graduated from her undergraduate degree in Biology in 1992 and received her master's degree in immunology in 1994 from the University of Porto. She received her PhD in molecular parasitology in 1998 from University College London, working at the affiliated National Institute for Medical Research with Will Jarra and Anthony Holder.
Go to Profile#2564
Marek‐marsel Mesulam
#69550
Overall Influence
#2565
Cristiano Dal Sasso
#36993
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Cristiano Dal Sasso is an Italian paleontologist. Biography He was born in Monza, Italy and has been working since 1991 for the Milan Natural History Museum where he is the curator of fossil reptiles and birds. He was the technical coordinator of the excavations of Besano, which brought to light the complete skeleton of a Middle Triassic marine reptile of the order of Ichthyosaurs, the Besanosaurus with embryos in the belly, published in 1996 along with Giovanni Pinna.
Go to Profile#2566
Victor Velculescu
#46720
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Victor E. Velculescu is a Professor of Oncology and Co-Director of Cancer Biology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is internationally known for his discoveries in genomics and cancer research.
Go to Profile#2567
Lynne Mca. Reid
#69633
Overall Influence
#2568
Alison Goate
#37375
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alison Mary Goate is a professor of neuroscience and Director of the Loeb Center for Alzheimer's Disease at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City. She was previously professor of genetics in psychiatry, professor of genetics, and professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#2569
Amitabh Joshi
#52424
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Amitabh Joshi is an Indian evolutionary biologist, population ecologist, geneticist and a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research . He heads the Evolutionary Biology Laboratory at JNCASR and is known for his studies on Evolutionary genetics and Population ecology. An elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, India, and Indian National Science Academy, he was also a J. C. Bose National Fellow of the Department of Science and Technology. He served as the Chief Editor of the Journal of Genetics and Editor of Publications of the Indian Academy of Sciences .
Go to Profile#2570
Bart Staels
#69698
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
#2571
Ali Shilatifard
#38437
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ali Shilatifard is an American biochemist/molecular biologist, the Robert Francis Furchgott Professor and chairman of the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics, and the director of the Simpson Query Institute for Epigenetics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He has served as a senior editor for the journal Science, and currently serves as the Editor for Science's open access journal Science Advances. Research in Shilatifard's lab focuses on the cause of childhood leukemia through chromosomal translocations, the role of ELL in this process, and the discover...
Go to Profile#2572
David B. Goldstein
#52050
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David Benjamin Goldstein is an American human geneticist. Goldstein is founding Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, Professor of Genetics and Development and directs the genomics core of Epi4K and administrative cores of Epi4K with Dan Lowenstein and Sam Berkovic.
Go to Profile#2573
Andrew P. Feinberg
#69730
Overall Influence
#2574
Enric Sala
#48564
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Enric Sala is a former university professor who saw himself writing the obituary of ocean life, and quit academia to become a full-time conservationist as a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. Sala’s present goals are to help protect critical marine ecosystems worldwide, and to develop new business models for marine conservation. He also produces documentary films and other media to raise awareness about the importance of a healthy environment, and to inspire country leaders to protect more of the natural world.
Go to Profile#2575
Yehuda Hiss
#16271
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Yehuda Hiss is a retired Israeli pathologist. He served as the Chief Pathologist at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine between 1988 and possibly as late as 2005. Hiss has also served as part of the faculty for the Terrorism and Medicine Program at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at IDC Herzliya and in the Department of Pathology for the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#2576
Richard Jackson
#55186
Overall Influence
Richard Jackson is a biochemist and cell biologist. He is Emeritus Professor of RNA Biochemistry in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. In 2006, Jackson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Jackson's main contributions to cell biology concern the translation of a cell's genetic instruction by ribosomes into proteins, utilizing messenger RNA.
Go to Profile#2577
D. Elmo Hardy
#49230
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Dilbert Elmo Hardy was an American entomologist who specialized in Diptera systematics. Biography Hardy was born on September 3, 1914, in Lehi, Utah. He died on October 17, 2002, in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was married to Agnes Thomas Hardy who played a pivotal role in supporting his education, his career as well as illustrating his scientific articles.
Go to Profile#2578
Peter Crane
#43725
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Sir Peter Crane, FRS is the current President of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and Senior Research Scientist in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. In addition to his work in leading and developing educational and natural history organizations, including the Field Museum in Chicago and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he has had a long career as a professor and researcher in both the U.K. and the United States. He is best known for his work on the origin and early evolution of flowering plants based on studies of the plant fossil record. His popular writing...
Go to Profile#2579
Guy Salvesen
#56956
Overall Influence
Guy Salvesen is a South African-born biochemist, best known for his work in the field of apoptosis. His research focuses on proteases and their inhibitors in humans, with particular emphasis on the caspases of the apoptotic cell death pathway.
Go to Profile#2580
Joseph Heitman
#66239
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Joseph Heitman is an American physician-scientist focused on research in genetics, microbiology, and infectious diseases. He is the James B. Duke Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Duke University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#2581
Kay Davies
#37139
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dame Kay Elizabeth Davies is a British geneticist. She is Dr Lee's Professor of Anatomy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. She is director of the Medical Research Council functional genetics unit, a governor of the Wellcome Trust, a director of the Oxford Centre for Gene Function, and a patron and Senior Member of Oxford University Scientific Society. Her research group has an international reputation for work on Duchenne muscular dystrophy . In the 1980s, she developed a test which allowed for the screening of foetuses whose mothers have a high risk of ca...
Go to Profile#2582
Virginia Zakian
#49888
Overall Influence
Virginia Zakian is the Harry C. Wiess Professor in the Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She is the director of the Zakian Lab, which has done important research in topics such as telomere-binding protein, telomere recombination, and telomere position effects, at Princeton University. She is a fellow at the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science., and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences . Zakian served as the chair of "Princeton's Task force on the Status of Women Faculty in ...
Go to Profile#2583
Kathleen Treseder
#45615
Overall Influence
Kathleen Kay Treseder is an American ecologist who specializes in the interplay between global climate change and fungal ecology. She also serves as a member of the Irvine City Council after being elected to the position in 2022. She is currently a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Ecological Society of America.
Go to Profile#2584
Vernon R. Young
#36706
Overall Influence
1937 - 2004 (67 years)
Vernon Robert Young was an expert on protein and amino acid requirements and researched how the human body processes nutrients into protein. Young was a principal organizer of amino acid Workshops sponsored by the International Council of Amino Acid Science and was the Chairman of the Council's Scientific Advisory Board.
Go to Profile#2585
Peter Hausen
#67136
Overall Influence
1935 - 2012 (77 years)
Peter Hausen was a German developmental biologist who spent most of his career at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, where he was appointed Director of the Department of Cell Biology in 1973. Hausen died in 2012.
Go to Profile#2586
Mriganka Sur
#24070
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mriganka Sur is the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and N.R. Narayana Murthy Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research at the Centre for Computational Brain Research, IIT Madras. He was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2010 and has been serving as Jury Chair from 2018.
Go to Profile#2587
Derek Roff
#57021
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Derek A. Roff is a professor emeritus of evolutionary ecology at McGill University, currently associated with the University of California at Riverside. His research focuses include population genetics, quantitative genetics, and life history evolution.
Go to Profile#2588
Paul Mandel
#70000
Overall Influence
#2589
Walter Jackson Freeman
#70009
Overall Influence
#2590
Lindsey A. Criswell
#35256
Overall Influence
Lindsey A. Criswell is an American rheumatologist and physician-scientist. She is director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. Criswell was vice chancellor of research at University of California, San Francisco where she held the Jean S. Engleman Distinguished Professorship in Rheumatology.
Go to Profile#2591
Hans Kosterlitz
#29074
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Hans Walter Kosterlitz FRS was a German-born British biochemist. Biography Hans Walter Kosterlitz was born on 27 April 1903 in Berlin. He was the elder son of Bernhard Kosterlitz, a physician, and Selma Helena Lepman.
Go to Profile#2592
Karl Zilles
#66599
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Karl Zilles was a German neuroscientist and anatomist. From 1991 to 2012, he was professor at the University of Düsseldorf and director of the C. and O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research.
Go to Profile#2593
Jeffrey A. Lockwood
#34880
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey Alan Lockwood is an author, entomologist, and University of Wyoming professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities. He writes both nonfiction science books, as well as meditations. Lockwood is the recipient of both the Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Medal. He also serves on the Advisory Council of METI .
Go to Profile#2594
Ruth Gates
#52913
Overall Influence
1962 - 2018 (56 years)
Ruth Deborah Gates was the Director of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology and the first woman to be President of the International Society for Reef Studies. Her research was dedicated to understanding coral reef ecosystems, specifically coral-algal symbiosis and the capacity for corals to acclimatize under future climate change conditions. Doctor Gates is most accredited with looking at coral biology and human-assisted coral evolution, known as super corals, as notably seen in the documentary Chasing Coral, available on Netflix.
Go to Profile#2595
Jerome Frank
#22984
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Jerome David Frank was an American psychiatrist who held the post of Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. His book Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy was influential in his field. Frank's personal papers are archived in the Personal Papers Collections of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins University. He earned degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#2596
Paul M. Sharp
#58089
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paul Martin Sharp is Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, where he holds the Alan Robertson chair of genetics in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology. Education Sharp was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1979 followed by a PhD in 1982 for research using quantitative genetics on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster supervised by Alan Robertson.
Go to Profile#2597
John C. Wingfield
#70067
Overall Influence
#2598
John Oxford
#35785
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Sydney Oxford is an English virologist and a professor at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a leading expert on influenza, including bird flu and the 1918 Spanish Influenza, and HIV/AIDS.
Go to Profile#2599
Avery August
#51790
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Avery August is a Belizean-born American scientist who is currently a professor of immunology and vice provost at Cornell University. Education Avery August was born in Belize City, Belize. August attended government primary schools, and subsequently attended St. Michael's College for Boys , where he earned a High School Diploma. Following one year at the Belize Technical College, he emigrated with his family to Los Angeles, California. There he attended California State University, Los Angeles, where he earned a B.S. degree in Medical Technology. While at California State University, he got ...
Go to Profile#2600
Robert G. Webb
#44924
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Robert Gravem Webb was an American herpetologist, expert in the systematics and biogeography of reptiles and amphibians, and professor emeritus of biological science at the University of Texas, El Paso.
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