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,
#2751
Michal Linial
#57512
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Michal Linial is a Professor of Biochemistry and Bioinformatics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . Linial is the Director of The Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology at HUJI. Since 2015, she is head of the ELIXIR-Israel node .
Go to Profile#2752
David Krakauer
#17937
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
David Krakauer is an American evolutionary biologist. He is the President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. Biography Born in Hawaii, Krakauer grew up in southern Portugal and moved to London, England, for secondary school.
Go to Profile#2753
Stuart West
#61662
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Stuart West is an evolutionary biologist studying social evolution as a Professor of Evolutionary Biology in the Zoology Department at the University of Oxford. His primary research interests are in the area of social evolution, sex allocation theory and microbial evolution. His research has attracted much media attention, and has been published in high profile journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS and Current Biology.
Go to Profile#2754
Ralph Bock
#69955
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Ralph Bock is a German molecular biologist who researches in plant physiology. Education and career After graduating from the University of Halle in 1993, Bock moved to the University of Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 1996. Part of his study was carried out at Rutgers University in the lab of Pal Maliga's. After habilitation, Bock headed a research group in Freiburg and became a professor in 1999. In 2001, Bock accepted a faculty position at the University of Münster as director and professor at the Institute for Plant Biochemistry and Biotechnology.
Go to Profile#2755
Stephen W. Pacala
#36396
Overall Influence
Stephen W. Pacala is the Frederick D. Petrie Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He has worked on climate change, population ecology, and global interactions between the biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .
Go to Profile#2756
Kenneth O. Emery
#63079
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Kenneth Orris Emery was a Canadian-born American marine geologist. Biography Emery grew up in Texas and studied engineering at North Texas Agricultural College. He then studied geology at the University of Illinois, where he received in 1935 a B.S. and in 1939 an M.S. In 1937 he and another graduate student, Robert S. Dietz, moved with their mentor Francis Parker Shepard from the University of Illinois to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. There Emery pursued doctoral research on the California continental margin. He received in 1941 his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Illinois.
Go to Profile#2757
Karen A. Matthews
#69822
Overall Influence
Karen A. Matthews is an American health psychologist known for her research on the epidemiology and risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, early signs of coronary heart disease risk in children, women's health and menopause, and connections between socioeconomic status and health. She is Professor Emerita of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#2758
Ladislav Tauc
#49329
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Ladislav Tauc was a French neuroscientist, born in Pardubice, Czechoslovakia. He was a pioneer in neuroethology and neuronal physiology, who immigrated to France in 1949 to work at the Institut Marey in Paris. Tauc was the founder and former director of the Laboratoire de Neurobiologie Cellulaire et Moléculaire of the French National Centre for Scientific Research . He was one of the teachers of Eric R. Kandel. There Eric R. Kandel started to investigate the gill withdrawal reflex and postsynaptic potentials in identified neurons in the abdominal ganglion of Aplysia.
Go to Profile#2759
Olga Troyanskaya
#58423
Overall Influence
Olga G. Troyanskaya is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and the Deputy Director for Genomics at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Biology in NYC. She studies protein function and interactions in biological pathways by analyzing genomic data using computational tools.
Go to Profile#2760
John E. Mack
#2350
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
John Edward Mack was an American psychiatrist, writer, and professor of psychiatry. He served as the head of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School from 1977 to 2004. In 1977, Mack won the Pulitzer Prize for his book A Prince of Our Disorder on T.E. Lawrence.
Go to Profile#2761
Nevan Krogan
#61304
Overall Influence
Nevan J. Krogan is a Canadian molecular and systems biologist. He is a professor and the Director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at the University of California San Francisco , as well as a senior investigator at the J. David Gladstone Institutes.
Go to Profile#2762
Martin Bobrow
#41662
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Martin Bobrow is a British geneticist, and Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge. Bobrow graduated in South Africa and then migrated to the United Kingdom. He held chairs of medical genetics at the University of Amsterdam and at Guy's Hospital, and from 1995 to 2005 was professor of medical genetics at Cambridge University.
Go to Profile#2763
Suzanne Hand
#67143
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Suzanne J. Hand is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, a teacher of geology and biology, who has a special interest in vertebrate palaeontology and modern mammals. Her research has been published in over a hundred articles, and is especially focused on the subjects of evolutionary biology, functional morphology, phylogenetics, and biogeography. Hand is a co-leader of the research team investigating the Riversleigh World Heritage Area, regarded as one of the four most important sites of fossil-bearing formations in the world.
Go to Profile#2764
William Shear
#47987
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
William Albert Shear is Trinkle Professor Emeritus at Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia. He is a spider and myriapod expert who has published more than 200 scientific articles primarily on harvestman and millipede taxonomy.
Go to Profile#2765
Sandra Díaz
#30116
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Sandra Myrna Díaz ForMemRS is an Argentine ecologist and professor of ecology at the National University of Córdoba. She studies the functional traits of plants and investigates how plants impact the ecosystem.
Go to Profile#2766
Christopher McKay
#23858
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Dr Christopher P. McKay is an American planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, studying planetary atmospheres, astrobiology, and terraforming. McKay majored in physics at Florida Atlantic University, where he also studied mechanical engineering, graduating in 1975, and received his PhD in astrogeophysics from the University of Colorado in 1982.
Go to Profile#2767
Hans Wigzell
#72712
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#2768
Gerald Mayr
#54894
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Gerald Mayr is a German palaeontologist who is Curator of Ornithology at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Hesse. He has published extensively on fossil birds, especially the Paleogene avifauna of Europe. He is an expert on the Eocene fauna of the Messel pit.
Go to Profile#2769
Jim B. Tucker
#26348
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jim B. Tucker is a child psychiatrist and Bonner-Lowry Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. His main research interests are documenting stories of children whom he claims remember previous lives, and natal and prenatal memories. He is the author of Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, which presents an overview of over four decades of reincarnation research at the Division of Perceptual Studies. Tucker worked for several years on this research with Ian Stevenson before taking ove...
Go to Profile#2770
William F. Laurance
#43089
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
William F. Laurance , also known as Bill Laurance, is Distinguished Research Professor at James Cook University, Australia and has been elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He has received an Australian Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. He held the Prince Bernhard Chair for International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands from 2010 to 2014.
Go to Profile#2771
Ed Harlow
#58093
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ed Harlow is an American molecular biologist. Harlow received the Ph.D. degree from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories in London. Harlow is professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#2772
Olive Mary Hilliard
#60809
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
Olive Mary Hilliard was a South African botanist and taxonomist. Hilliard authored 372 land plant species names, the fifth-highest number of such names authored by any female scientist. Hilliard was born in Durban on 4 July 1925. She attended Natal University from 1943 to 1947, where she obtained an MSc and later a PhD. She worked at the National Herbarium in Pretoria in 1947-48 and was a lecturer in botany at Natal University from 1954 to 1962. In 1963 she became curator of the herbarium at Natal University and a research fellow. Her special fields of interest were the flora of Natal and the...
Go to Profile#2773
Ian Calman Muir MacLennan
#57572
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Ian Calman Muir MacLennan is Emeritus Professor of Immunology at the University of Birmingham MRC Centre for Immune Regulation in Birmingham, UK. He was born on 30 December 1939. He has made pioneering contributions to immunology and was the first to discover marginal zone B-cells.
Go to Profile#2774
John Smol
#54690
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
John P. Smol, is a Canadian ecologist, limnologist and paleolimnologist who is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Biology at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, where he also held the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change for the maximum of three 7-year terms . He founded and co-directs the Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Lab .
Go to Profile#2775
Junying Yuan
#59134
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Junying Yuan is the Elizabeth D. Hay Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, best known for her work in cell death. Early in her career, she contributed significant findings to the discovery and characterization of apoptosis. More recently, she was responsible for the discovery of the programmed form of necrotic cell death known as necroptosis.
Go to Profile#2776
Jan van Hooff
#56531
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Johan Antoon Reinier Alex Maria "Jan" van Hooff is a Dutch biologist best known for his research involving primates. He was professor of comparative physiology at Utrecht University from 1980 to 2001.
Go to Profile#2777
Ángel Lulio Cabrera
#69985
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Ángel Lulio Cabrera was an Argentinian botanist. Biography Born in Madrid, Cabrera was the son of zoologist and paleontologist Ángel Cabrera and nephew of the first Anglican bishop in Spain, Juan Bautista Cabrera. His vocation in biology was influenced by family vacations in the Sierra de Guadarrama, as well as his father's profession.
Go to Profile#2778
Mark Westoby
#67514
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mark Westoby is an Australian evolutionary ecologist, emeritus professor at Macquarie University, and a specialist in trait ecology. He is best known for an approach to ecological strategy schemes that arranges plant species along dimensions of measurable traits. This research investigated important trade-offs that govern diversification of strategies of plants in order to understand the similarities and differences across species. Westoby was a leader in the communal effort to compile trait data worldwide, and is currently working on a similar approach to ecological strategies across bacteria and archaea.
Go to Profile#2779
David S. Ingram
#54510
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David Stanley Ingram, OBE, VMH, FRSB, FRSE, FLS, F.I. Hort is an Honorary Professor of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh Ingram served as master of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, between 2000 and 2007.
Go to Profile#2780
Xavier Saelens
#56261
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Xavier Saelens is a Belgian scientist and currently his main research interest is finding a universal influenza vaccine. He is a lecturer in Virology and Group Leader of the Molecular Virology Unit at the University of Ghent .
Go to Profile#2781
John Alroy
#38148
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
John Alroy is a paleobiologist born in New York in 1966 and now residing in Sydney, Australia. Area of expertise Alroy specializes in diversity curves, speciation, and extinction of North American fossil mammals and Phanerozoic marine invertebrates, connecting regional and local diversity, taxonomic composition, body mass distributions, ecomorphology, and phylogenetic patterns to intrinsic diversity dynamics, evolutionary trends, mass extinctions, and the effects of global climate change.
Go to Profile#2782
John Giesy
#71040
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Paul Giesy Jr. is an American ecotoxicologist. He is a Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Toxicology at the University of Saskatchewan. Giesy was credited with being the first scientist to discover toxic per- and poly-fluoroalkyl [PFAS] chemicals in the environment. His discoveries also include the photo-enhanced toxicity and the presence of perfluorinated chemicals in the environment.
Go to Profile#2783
Ray David Owen
#65664
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Ray David Owen was a teacher and scientist whose discovery of unusual, “mixed,” red blood cell types in cattle twins in 1945 launched the fields of modern immunology and organ transplantation. Owen's 1945 findings were published in the journal Science. This observation demonstrated that self was “learned” by the immune system during development and paved the way for research involving induction of immune tolerance and early tissue grafting. When Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Sir Peter Brian Medawar were awarded their 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance, Owen was not mentioned in the prize.
Go to Profile#2784
Henry Alfred Schroeder
#72883
Overall Influence
#2785
Clara Franzini-Armstrong
#42218
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Clara Franzini-Armstrong is an Italian-born American electron microscopist, and Professor Emeritus of Cell and Developmental Biology at University of Pennsylvania. Early life Clara Franzini was born on October 3, 1938, in Florence, Italy, along with her twin brother. As a child during World War II, she spent time in a hillside village. She lived with her mother, father and three brothers: Paolo, Carlo and Marco. The part of her childhood that occurred after the war consisted of competing with her brothers on exhausting mountain hikes, roller skating in Piazzale Michelangelo, observing the entire beautiful city and long relaxing times in scenic settings like the Dolomites.
Go to Profile#2786
Robert Curran
#65742
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Robert Crowe Curran FRCP FRCPath was a British pathologist, Leith Professor of Pathology, Birmingham University, 1966–1986. He served as President of the Royal College of Pathologists from 1981 to 1984.
Go to Profile#2787
Tao-ching Hsu
#72902
Overall Influence
#2788
Roscoe O. Brady
#72926
Overall Influence
#2789
Lewis Joel Greene
#48697
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Lewis Joel Greene is an American Brazilian biochemist, scientist, university professor and editor of the Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research. Greene received a BA in liberal arts from Amherst College in 1955 and a PhD in biochemistry and cell biology at Rockefeller University in 1962. After his doctorate, he went to work for 12 years as a tenured researcher in the department of biology at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Upon an invitation to become a visiting scientist as a Fulbright scholar for a year at the department of pharmacology of the Faculty of Medicine of Ribeirão P...
Go to Profile#2790
Paul K. Stumpf
#63287
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Paul K. Stumpf was an American biochemist, "a world leader in the field of plant biochemistry" according to the National Academy of Sciences and the University of California. Specifically the University of California said that "Stumpf pioneered the study of the biochemistry of lipids in plants". Stumpf was chairman of the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#2791
Martin Lockley
#47971
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Martin G. Lockley was a Welsh palaeontologist. He was educated in the United Kingdom where he obtained degrees and post-doctoral experience in Geology in the 1970s. Since 1980 he had been a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, and was later Professor Emeritus. He is best known for his work on fossil footprints and was the former director of the Dinosaur Tracks Museum at UCD. He was an Associate Curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and Research Associate at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. During his years at UCD he earned a BA in 2007 in Span...
Go to Profile#2792
Daniel T. Blumstein
#61355
Overall Influence
Daniel T. Blumstein is an ethologist and conservation biologist. He is professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, as well as a professor for the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has authored or co-authored over 300 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Furthermore, he authored the book The Failure of Environmental Education with Charles Saylan, which was featured in the 2011 "Summer Reading: 7 Education Books to Take to the Beach" in Time magazine. Because of his work in conservation and education...
Go to Profile#2793
Robert H. Roth
#72998
Overall Influence
#2794
Russell Gray
#35690
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Russell David Gray is a New Zealand evolutionary biologist and psychologist working on applying quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. In 2020, he became a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Although originally trained in biology and psychology, Gray has become well known for his studies on the evolution of the Indo-European and Austronesian language families using computational phylogenetic methods.
Go to Profile#2795
Henry Anthony Erlich
#73023
Overall Influence
#2796
Wolfgang Joklik
#63326
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Wolfgang Karl "Bill" Joklik was a virologist and James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Duke University, from which he retired in 1993 after 25 years chairing the department. In 1981, he founded the American Society for Virology, the first scientific society specifically for virologists, and served a two-year term as its founding president. In the same year, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. He has been described as "one of the earliest molecular virologists" and is best known for his research on poxviruses and reoviruses, an...
Go to Profile#2797
Peter Furness
#68906
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Peter Norman Furness is a British pathologist, professor of pathology at the University of Leicester, and president of the Royal College of Pathologists 2008–2011. Professor Furness was elected for a second term of office as President of the Royal College of Pathologists in 2020 but was debarred from office after allegations of misconduct were upheld following an independent investigation and disciplinary hearing.
Go to Profile#2798
Eric A. Boerwinkle
#73097
Overall Influence
#2799
Meinrad Busslinger
#62228
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Meinrad Busslinger is a biochemist and immunologist, renown for his work on B cells. He is a Senior Scientist and Scientific Deputy Director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria.
Go to Profile#2800
Roger S. Goody
#52165
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Roger Sidney Goody is an English biochemist who served as director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Dortmund from 1993 until 2013. Since 2013 he is Emeritus Director of the institute.
Go to Profile