Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#2651

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

#70797

Overall Influence

#2652

Karl Heinz Schleifer

#70881

Overall Influence

#2653

Emil L. Smith

#36709

Overall Influence

1911 - 2009 (98 years)

Emil L. Smith was an American biochemist who studied protein structure and function as well as biochemical evolution. Initially intending to go into medicine, Smith became interested in biology and organic chemistry during his second year at Columbia University. He earned a B.S. in 1931 and stayed at Columbia to study photosynthesis under Selig Hecht, completing a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1936. In 1938, he went to Cambridge University on a Guggenheim Fellowship to work with David Keilin on the chlorophyll-protein complex. Upon returning to the U.S. during World War II, he took a position at Yale University's Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station to work with Hubert Bradford Vickery.

#2654

Mickey Goldberg

#55399

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael E. Goldberg , also known as Mickey Goldberg, is an American neuroscientist and David Mahoney Professor at Columbia University. He is known for his work on the mechanisms of the mammalian eye in relation to brain activity. He served as president of the Society for Neuroscience from 2009 to 2010.

#2655

Mark Borodovsky

#47796

Overall Influence

Mark Borodovsky is a Regents' Professor at the Join Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech. He has also been a Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, Russia from 2012 to 2022.

#2656

Leslie Christidis

#60617

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Leslie Christidis , also simply known as Les Christidis, is an Australian ornithologist. His main research field is the evolution and systematics of birds. He has been director of Southern Cross University National Marine Science Centre since 2009. He was assistant director at Sydney's Australian Museum from 2004 to 2009.

#2657

Owen White

#66695

Overall Influence

Owen R. White is a bioinformatician and director of the Institute For Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He is known for his work on the bioinformatics tools GLIMMER and MUMmer.

#2658

Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz

#58283

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz is a Senior Group Leader at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and a founding member of the Neuronal Cell Biology Program at Janelia. Previously, she was the Chief of the Section on Organelle Biology in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program, in the Division of Intramural Research in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 2016. Lippincott-Schwartz received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and performed post-doctoral training with Richard Kl...

#2659

James C. Mcwilliams

#70990

Overall Influence

#2660

Robert Denno

#59953

Overall Influence

1945 - 2008 (63 years)

Robert F. Denno was an influential insect ecologist. He published more than 130 research papers that helped advance the study of plant–insect interactions, interspecific competition, predator prey interactions and food web dynamics. He studied the ecology of sap-feeding insects, both in natural and cultivated settings. His study of wing polymorphism expanded into the fields of life history evolution , plant and herbivore interactions , community ecology , and many aspects of predator ecology, reviewed recently in Denno et al. .

#2661

Stephen Dunnett

#49358

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Stephen "Steve" Dunnett DSc FMedSci FLSW is a British neuroscientist, and among the most highly cited researcherss in the neurosciences. Until his retirement in 2017, he was a professor at Cardiff University and the founder and co-director of the Brain Repair Group, where he worked on developing cell therapies for neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease.

#2662

Natalia Pasternak Taschner

Natalia Pasternak Taschner

#56775

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Natalia Pasternak Taschner is a Brazilian microbiologist, author, and science communicator. She is the first president of the Instituto Questão de Ciência . She was director of the Brazilian arm of the science festival, Pint of Science , columnist for the Brazilian national newspaper "O Globo", for The Skeptic magazine , and Medscape . She also hosts two weekly radio shows “The hour of Science” at Brazil's CBN national radio station. Taschner is also the publisher of Brazil's first magazine on critical thinking, Revista Questao de Ciencia.

#2663

Carl Hart

#16304

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Carl L. Hart is an American psychologist and neuroscientist, working as the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. Hart is known for his research on drug abuse and drug addiction, his advocacy for the legalization of recreational drugs, and his recreational use of drugs. Hart became the first tenured African American professor of sciences at Columbia University. He is the author of two books for the general public, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery that Challenges Everything You Know about Drugs and Society and Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chas...

#2664

Paul S. Appelbaum

#25019

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Paul Stuart Appelbaum is an American psychiatrist and a leading expert on legal and ethical issues in medicine and psychiatry. Appelbaum has been Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Law, and Director, Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons since 2006. \Appelbaum was President of the American Psychiatric Association and President of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law .

#2665

Janet Hemingway

Janet Hemingway

#48176

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Janet Hemingway is a British infectious diseases specialist. She is the former Director of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and founding Director of Infection Innovation Consortium and Professor of Tropical Medicine at LSTM. She is current President of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

#2666

Hugh Pennington

#31634

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Thomas Hugh Pennington, CBE, FRCPath, FRCP , FMedSci, FRSE is emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Outside academia, he is best known as the chair of the Pennington Group inquiry into the Scottish Escherichia coli outbreak of 1996 and as Chairman of the Public Inquiry into the 2005 Outbreak of E. coli O157 in South Wales.

#2667

H. Christian Fibiger

#71150

Overall Influence

#2668

C. V. Subramanian

#32357

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Chirayathumadom Venkatachalier Subramanian , popularly known as CVS, was an Indian mycologist, taxonomist and plant pathologist, known for his work on the classification of Fungi imperfecti, a group of fungi classified separately due to lack of specific taxonomic characteristics. He authored one monograph, Hyphomycetes: An Account of Indian Species, Except Cercosporae and three books, Hyphomycetes, taxonomy and biology, Moulds, Mushrooms and Men and Soil microfungi of Israel, besides several articles published in peer-reviewed journals. He was a recipient of many honours including the Rafi Ahm...

#2669

Spencer Barrett

#68767

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Spencer Charles Hilton Barrett is a Canadian evolutionary biologist, formerly a Canada Research Chair at University of Toronto and, in 2010, was named Extraordinary Professor at University of Stellenbosch.

#2670

Hitoshi Okamura

#29928

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Hitoshi Okamura is a Japanese scientist who specializes in chronobiology. He is currently a professor of Systems Biology at Kyoto University Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Research Director of the Japan Science Technology Institute, CREST. Okamura's research group cloned mammalian Period genes, visualized clock oscillation at the single cell level in the central clock of the SCN, and proposed a time-signal neuronal pathway to the adrenal gland. He received a Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon in 2007 for his research and was awarded Aschoff's Ruler for his work on circadian rhythms in rodents.

#2671

Antoine Danchin

#19674

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Antoine Danchin is a French geneticist. He is best known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of adenylate cyclase, to modelling of learning in the nervous system and the early development of genomics and bioinformatics. He is the Chairman of the startup AMAbiotics which specialises in metabolic bioremediation and synthetic biology. He was the director of the Department Genomes and Genetics at the Institut Pasteur in Paris where he headed the Genetics of Bacterial Genomes Unit.

#2672

Armando Theodoro Hunziker

#59925

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Armando Theodoro Hunziker was an Argentine botanist. He had specialized in the study of systems biology of the family Solanaceae, having contributed with a large number of investigations and publications.

#2673

Arturo Zychlinsky

#67584

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Arturo Zychlinsky is a biologist and since 2001 director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. His research focuses on Neutrophil Extracellular Traps which he discovered together with Volker Brinkmann, and the immune function of chromatin.

#2674

Chris D. Thomas

#48793

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Christian David Thomas is a past president of the Royal Entomological Society. He is also Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York. He completed his first degree in Applied Biology at the University of Cambridge, followed by an MSc in Ecology at the University of Bangor and a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. A Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of York, he also serves as director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, a new £10 million transdisciplinary research centre funded for 10 years from 2019.

#2675

Eugene P. Cronkite

#71228

Overall Influence

#2676

Tatiana Birshtein

#37852

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

Tatiana Birshtein or Tat'yana Maksimovna Birshtein was a Russian molecular scientist. Birshtein specialised in the physics of polymers. In 2007 she was given the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.

#2677

Magnus Lidén

#64074

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Magnus Lidén is a Swedish systematic botanist. Lidén received a PhD in systematic botany from Gothenburg University in 1986, where he stayed until 1997. He was the director of the Uppsala Botanic Gardens from 1998 – 2003. Since 2004, he has been a researcher at the department of Systematic Biology at the Evolutionary Biology Center of Uppsala University.

#2678

Xiaohong Rose Yang

#35435

Overall Influence

Xiaohong Rose Yang is an American biomedical scientist researching the genetics of dysplastic nevus syndrome and chordoma, and etiologic heterogeneity of breast cancer. She is a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute. Yang leads breast cancer studies in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.

#2679

Yoh Iwasa

#71377

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Yoh Iwasa is a Japanese Mathematical Biologist who is considered the leading mathematical biologist in Japan. His work includes the evolution of costly mate preferences and the evolutionary dynamics of cancer. Notable papers include:"The evolution of costly mate preferences II. The 'handicap' principle" Evolution 1991"Demographic theory for an open marine population with space-limited recruitment" with Joan Roughgarden Ecology 1985"Dynamics of chronic myeloid leukaemia" Nature 2005"Prey distribution as a factor determining the choice of optimal foraging strategy" The American Naturalist 1981...

#2680

Randy Buckner

#65470

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Randy L. Buckner is an American neuroscientist and psychologist whose research focuses on understanding how large-scale brain circuits support mental function and how dysfunction arises in illness. Buckner is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Harvard University. He is affiliated with the Center for Brain Science and is Director of the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Division at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also faculty of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.

#2681

Jan Lever

#32998

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Jan Lever was a Dutch biologist specialized in zoology, endocrinology and evolutionary biology. His ideas on evolution may be characterized as a form of theistic evolution. Lever was an important voice in shaping Dutch public debate on evolution and biology, particularly in protestant circles.

#2682

Laurence Hurst

#63885

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Laurence Daniel Hurst is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Bath and the director of the Milner Centre for Evolution. Education Hurst was educated at Truro School and the University of Cambridge where he studied the Natural Sciences Tripos at Churchill College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1987. After a year at Harvard University he returned to the UK, and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford in 1991 for research supervised by W. D. Hamilton and Alan Grafen.

#2683

Geoffrey Clough Ainsworth

#59389

Overall Influence

1905 - 1998 (93 years)

Geoffrey Clough Ainsworth was a British mycologist and scientific historian. He was the older brother of Ruth Ainsworth. Education and work Ainsworth received his doctorate in Biology from the University of London in 1934. From the 1930s to 1960s, he studied and wrote on fungi including their medical uses. Later, he wrote on the history of the field with An Introduction to the History of Mycology , An Introduction to the History of Plant Pathology , and An Introduction to the History of Medical and Veterinary Mycology in 1986.

#2684

Dan Gusfield

#49390

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Daniel Mier Gusfield is an American computer scientist, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Gusfield is known for his research in combinatorial optimization and computational biology.

#2685

Toshiharu (toshi) Nagatsu

#71524

Overall Influence

#2686

Robert Dantzer

#71532

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

#2687

Adrian V. S. Hill

#57255

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sir Adrian Vivian Sinton Hill, is an Irish vaccinologist , Director of the Jenner Institute and Lakshmi Mittal and Family Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford, an honorary Consultant Physician in Infectious Diseases, and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Hill is a leader in the field of malaria vaccine development and was a co-leader of the research team which produced the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, along with Professor Sarah Gilbert of the Jenner Institute and Professor Andrew Pollard of the Oxford Vaccine Group.

#2688

Harlan Lewis

#55562

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Frank Harlan Lewis was an American botanist, geneticist, taxonomist, systematist, and evolutionist who worked primarily with plants in the genus Clarkia. He is best known for his theories of "catastrophic selection" and "saltationalal speciation", which are closely aligned with the concepts of quantum evolution and sympatric speciation. The concepts were first articulated in 1958 by Lewis and Peter H. Raven, and later refined in a 1962 paper by Lewis in which he coined the term "catastrophic selection". In 1966, he referred to the same mechanism as "saltational speciation".

#2689

Dennis L. Murphy

#71555

Overall Influence

#2690

Ronald L. Phillips

#32576

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Ronald L. Phillips is an American biologist and a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota. In 1985 he was elected a fellow and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1991 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

#2691

Robert Joseph Huebner

#71557

Overall Influence

#2692

Yoshinori Imaizumi

#37412

Overall Influence

1914 - 2007 (93 years)

Yoshinori Imaizumi was a Japanese zoologist. He is known for describing the Iriomote cat in 1967. He was the director of the zoological department of the National Museum of Nature and Science.

#2693

Jeffrey Trent

#48477

Overall Influence

Jeffrey M. Trent is the founding president and director of the Translational Genomics Research Institute. He has been vice president and Research Director of the Van Andel Institute since 2009. He was the founding director of NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute in 1993.

#2694

Allan Bradley

#49030

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Allan Bradley FRS is a British geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Education Bradley was educated at the University of Cambridge where he earned Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts and PhD degrees in genetics from Trinity College, Cambridge gained while working in the laboratory of Martin Evans.

#2695

Barbara A. Schaal

Barbara A. Schaal

#25088

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Barbara Anna Schaal American scientist, evolutionary biologist, is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and served as vice president of the National Academy of Sciences from 2005 to 2013. She is the first woman to be elected vice president of the academy. From 2009 to 2017, Schaal served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .

#2696

Alan R. Saltiel

Alan R. Saltiel

#47515

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alan Robert Saltiel is an American endocrinologist and biochemist. He is Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, holds the Maryam Ahmadian Endowed Chair in Metabolic Health, the Director of the UCSD/UCLA Diabetes Research Center and Director of the Institute for Diabetes and Metabolic Health at the University of California, San Diego.

#2697

Teruo Okano

#71661

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

#2698

Peter Beighton

#38342

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Peter H Beighton was a medical geneticist. Born in Lancashire in England in 1934 and qualified in medicine in 1957 at St Mary's Hospital, University of London. After several internships, Beighton served as a Medical Officer in the Parachute Regiment and with the United Nations forces during the Congo Crisis. In 1966 Beighton began training in internal medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in London and held a Fulbright research fellowship in clinical genetics in 1968-69 with Dr. Victor McKusick at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, USA.

#2699

Frances Brodsky

#63791

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Frances Brodsky is an American cell biologist. She is known for her work on clathrin and its role in the function of the immune system. She is a professor of cell biology and the director of the Division of Biosciences at University College London. She is the author of three scientific mystery novels under the pseudonym B.B. Jordan. She was the founding editor of the journal Traffic.

#2700

Vikram Patel

#22562

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Vikram Harshad Patel FMedSci is an Indian psychiatrist and researcher best known for his work on child development and mental disability in low-resource settings. He is the Co-Founder and former Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine , Co-Director of the Centre for Control of Chronic Conditions at the Public Health Foundation of India, and the Co-Founder of Sangath, an Indian NGO dedicated to research in the areas of child development, adolescent health and mental health. Since 2016 he has been Pershing Professor of Global Health...

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