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).

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#2801

Irene Tracey

#23936
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Irene Mary Carmel Tracey is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and former Warden of Merton College, Oxford. She is also Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and formerly Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Oxford. She is a co-founder of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain , now the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. Her team’s research is focused on the neuroscience of pain, specifically pain perception and analgesia as well as how anaesthetics produce altered states of consciousness.
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#2802

Amitabha Chattopadhyay

#49620
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Amitabha Chattopadhyay is an Indian scientist working in the areas of membrane and receptor biology and biophysics . He is presently a CSIR Bhatnagar Fellow at the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology and served as the founding dean of biological sciences at the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research . In addition, he is a distinguished visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, adjunct professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University , Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research , Swinburne University of Technology , and honorary professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research .
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#2803

Michael Shelley

#26963
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Michael J. Shelley is an American applied mathematician who works on the modeling and simulation of complex systems arising in physics and biology. This has included free-boundary problems in fluids and materials science, singularity formation in partial differential equations, modeling visual perception in the primary visual cortex, dynamics of complex and active fluids, cellular biophysics, and fluid-structure interaction problems such as the flapping of flags, stream-lining in nature, and flapping flight. He is also the co-founder and co-director of the Courant Institute's Applied Mathemat...
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#2804

Segenet Kelemu

Segenet Kelemu
#37060
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Segenet Kelemu is an Ethiopian scientist, noted for her research as a molecular plant pathologist, and outstanding scientific leadership. For close to three decades, Kelemu and her team's research has contributed to addressing agricultural constraints in Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America.
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#2805

Marcel Dicke

Marcel Dicke
#71585
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Marcel Dicke is a Dutch professor of entomology who has been affiliated with Wageningen University since 2002. He conducts research on insects and has published in the scientific journals Science and Nature. Dicke received the Spinoza Prize in 2007 for his research on the interactions between plants and insects.
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#2806

Nicholas R. Cozzarelli

#49469
Overall Influence
1938 - 2006 (68 years)
Nicholas Robert Cozzarelli was an American biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Education Cozzarelli attended Princeton University graduated with an A.B. in biology in 1960. He started graduate training at Harvard Medical School advised by E. C. C. Lin and earned a PhD in biochemistry in 1966. Cozzarelli was appointed a postdoctoral researcher with Arthur Kornberg and purified the T4-phage DNA ligase.
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#2807

J. Mark Davis

#73235
Overall Influence
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#2808

Martin Gibbs

#59590
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Martin Gibbs was an American biochemist and educator who worked in the field of carbon metabolism. The Martin Gibbs Medal, an award honoring individuals in plant sciences, is named in his honor. Career Gibbs was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and educated at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1947. Gibbs went on to work as a scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory that same year.
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#2809

Lorenz Studer

#44526
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Lorenz Studer is a Swiss biologist. He is the founder and director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He is a developmental biologist and neuroscientist who is pioneering the generation of midbrain dopamine neurons for transplantation and clinical applications. His expertise in cell engineering spans a wide range of cells/tissues within the nervous system geared toward disease modeling and exploring cell replacement therapy. Currently, he is a member of the Developmental Biology Program and Department of Neurosurgery at Memorial Slo...
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#2810

Oleh Hornykiewicz

Oleh Hornykiewicz
#30354
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Oleh Hornykiewicz was an Austrian biochemist. Life Oleh Hornykiewicz was born in 1926 in Sykhiw , then in Poland . In 1951, he received his M.D. degree from the University of Vienna and joined the faculty of his alma mater the same year and worked there ever since. He also served for twenty years as chairman of the Institute of Biochemical Pharmacology. In 1967, he began a long association with the University of Toronto in Canada and, in 1992, he was named professor emeritus at that institution.
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#2811

Willet F. Jr. Whitmore

#73302
Overall Influence
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#2812

Graham Thornicroft

#69589
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sir Graham Thornicroft PhD is a British psychiatrist, researcher and Professor of Community Psychiatry at the Centre for Global Mental Health and Centre for Implementation Science at King's College London. He also a Consultant Psychiatrist working at a community mental health team at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. He is best known for his work on community mental health services, stigma and discrimination, and global mental health. He has published over 30 books, and has written over 670 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Graham was made a Knight Bachelor in the 2017 Queen'...
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#2813

Howard Ronald Kaback

#70802
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Howard Ronald Kaback was an American biochemist, known for Kabackosomes, the cell-free membrane transport vesicles. He was the brother of Michael M. Kaback, pediatrician and human geneticist, who developed a screening program to detect and prevent Tay–Sachs disease, a rare and fatal genetic disorder most common in Ashkenazi Jews.
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#2814

Anna Akhmanova

Anna Akhmanova
#38040
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Anna Sergeevna Akhmanova is a Russian-born professor of Cell Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is best known for her research regarding microtubules and the proteins, called TIPs, that stabilize one specific end of the tubules. Among the awards she has won, she was one of the recipients of the 2018 Spinoza Prize, the highest honor for Dutch scientists.
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#2815

Augustus John Rush

#25356
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Augustus John Rush is an internationally renowned psychiatrist. He is a professor emeritus in Duke-NUS Medical School at the National University of Singapore , and adjunct professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He has authored and edited more than 10 books, and over 600 scientific journal articles that are largely focused on the diagnosis and treatment of depressive and bipolar disorders.
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#2816

Lynn Riddiford

#65789
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Lynn Moorhead Riddiford is an American entomologist and developmental biologist. She was the first female faculty member in the Harvard Biology Department where she served as an assistant and associate professor. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Washington. In 1997, she was the first awardee of the Recognition Award in Insect Physiology, Biochemistry, and Toxicology from the Entomological Society of America. Riddiford studies the endocrinology of insects, specifically the tobacco hornworm.
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#2817

Charles P. Gerba

#71658
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Charles P. Gerba is an American microbiologist. He currently is a professor at the University of Arizona. Dr. Gerba serves as a Spokesperson for Coverall Health-Based Cleaning System. Work Gerba is best known for work in environmental germ theory in the household. His surveys produced scientific backing for two useful bits of everyday advice; in kitchens, a reused washcloth is likely to be the most infectious and germ-carrying object in a house. In the bathroom, a flushed toilet with the seat up will spray germs into the air and disperse them throughout a room through a toilet plume.
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#2818

Stephen Hopper

#44316
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stephen Donald Hopper AC FLS FTSE is a Western Australian botanist. He graduated in Biology, specialising in conservation biology and vascular plants. Hopper has written eight books, and has over 200 publications to his name. He was Director of Kings Park in Perth for seven years, and CEO of the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority for five. He is currently Foundation Professor of Plant Conservation Biology at The University of Western Australia. He was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2006 to 2012.
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#2819

Günter Theißen

Günter Theißen
#70672
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Günter Theißen is a German geneticist. He holds the chair of genetics at the University of Jena. Life Theißen studied biology at the University of Düsseldorf and did his PhD in 1991 with Rolf Wagner at that university. From 1992–2001, he was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. He did his second doctorate at the University of Cologne in 2000. In 2001, he was appointed professor at the University of Münster. In 2002, he was appointed to hold the chair of genetics at the University of Jena.
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#2820

Russell Foster

Russell Foster
#41098
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Russell Grant Foster, CBE, FRS FMedSci is a British professor of circadian neuroscience, the Director of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology and the Head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute . He is also a Nicholas Kurti Senior Fellow at Brasenose College at the University of Oxford. Foster and his group are credited with key contributions to the discovery of the non-rod, non-cone, photosensitive retinal ganglion cells in the mammalian retina which provide input to the circadian rhythm system. He has written and co-authored over a hundred scientific publications.
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#2821

Cezmi Akdis

#67178
Overall Influence
Cezmi Akdis is a medical researcher in the field of immunology. He is director of the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research in Davos, Switzerland and the editor in chief of the journal Allergy.
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#2822

James E. Womack

#61328
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
James E. Womack is an American biologist and a professor at Texas A&M University. Birth and education James E. Womack was born on March 30, 1941 in the United States. He graduated with a BS in Mathematics Ed from Abilene Christian University in 1964. After completing his BS, he went to Oregon State University and completed his PhD in Genetics in 1968.
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#2823

Craig M. Crews

#51487
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Craig M. Crews is an American scientist at Yale University. He is the John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and also holds joint appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology. Crews is the Executive Director of the Yale Center for Molecular Discovery and a former Editor of the journal Cell Chemical Biology. His research interests focus on chemical biology, particularly on controlled proteostasis. Crews is a pioneer in the field of targeted protein degradation and his lab's research led to the development of the anti-cancer drug carfilzomib .
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#2824

Nektarios Tavernarakis

Nektarios Tavernarakis
#51508
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Nektarios N. Tavernarakis is a Greek bioscientist, who studies Ageing, Cell death, and Neurodegeneration. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Molecular Systems Biology at the Medical School of the University of Crete, and the Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Foundation for Research and Technology, in Heraklion, Crete, Greece. He is also the founder and first Director of the Graduate Program in Bioinformatics of the University of Crete Medical School, and has served as Director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, where he is heading the Neurogenetics and Ageing laboratory.
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#2825

Krešimir Krnjević

#68806
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Krešimir Krnjević was a Canadian-British neurophysiologist of Croatian extraction. Life and work Krnjević was born in Zagreb in the family of prominent politician Juraj Krnjević and spent most of his childhood abroad, including in Geneva, London and Cape Town. He attended the University of Edinburgh earning MBChb in 1949, BSc in physiology in 1951 and PhD in 1953 all at the University of Edinburgh. He continued his post-doctoral studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, 1954–1956, and at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, Canberra, 1956-1958 a...
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#2826

Ivet Bahar

#37004
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ivet Bahar is a Turkish-American computational biologist, currently serving as the Director of the Louis and Beatrice Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, Louis & Beatrice Laufer Endowed Chair and Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the Stony Brook University, School of Medicine. Before joining Stony Brook University, she served as Distinguished Professor, John K. Vries Chair and Founder of the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine , and as Assistant , Associate and Full Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey.
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#2827

Judith Lewis Herman

#4121
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Judith Lewis Herman is an American psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, and author who has focused on the understanding and treatment of incest and traumatic stress. Herman is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the Women's Mental Health Collective.
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#2828

Michael Levin

#54582
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michael Levin is an American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. Levin is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. He is also co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms with Josh Bongard.
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#2829

Patricia DeCoursey

#54578
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Patricia Jackson DeCoursey was a leading researcher in the field of chronobiology. Her research focused on behavioral, physiological, and ecological aspects of mammalian circadian rhythms. She is credited with creating the first Phase Response Curve . PRC’s are used throughout the field today to help illustrate the change of a biological oscillation in response to an external stimulus. She worked as a biology professor at the University of South Carolina from 1967 until her retirement as director of the W. Gordon Belser Arboretum in 2019.
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#2830

Murray S. Blum

#51698
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Murray Sheldon Blum was an American entomologist and a researcher in the field of chemical ecology. Born in 1929 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Blum grew up in that city and in Chicago. He earned a BSc in Biology and his Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Illinois in 1955. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he joined the faculty of Louisiana State University in 1957. In the 1960s he moved to the University of Georgia, where he spent three decades as a research professor before his retirement. The Entomological Society of America named him as outstanding scientist of...
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#2831

Timothy F. H. Allen

#45118
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Timothy F. H. Allen is a British botanist and former professor of Botany and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Allen is a leader in the fields of hierarchy theory, systems theory, and complexity.
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#2832

George Oster

#25343
Overall Influence
1940 - 2018 (78 years)
George Frederick Oster NAS was an American mathematical biologist, and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at University of California, Berkeley. He made seminal contributions to several varied fields including chaos theory, population dynamics, membrane dynamics and molecular motors. He was a 1985 MacArthur Fellow.
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#2833

William Barry Wood

#73649
Overall Influence
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#2834

Sampa Das

#45046
Overall Influence
Sampa Das is an Indian biotechnologist, scientist, and an expert on public sector agricultural biotechnology. She is a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India . Currently, she is Senior Professor and Head of the Division of Plant Biology at Bose Institute in Kolkata, which is a multi-disciplinary research institution focused on science and technology.
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#2835

Herman Goossens

#67412
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Herman Goossens is professor of microbiology at the University of Antwerp where he is head of the Laboratory of Medical Microbiology, part of PREPARE, the European Union's Platform for European Preparedness Against emerging Epidemics of which he is the coordinator.
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#2836

Sandra Steingraber

Sandra Steingraber
#21182
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sandra Steingraber is an American biologist, author, and cancer survivor. Steingraber writes and lectures on the environmentalal factors that contribute to reproductive health problems and environmental links to cancer.
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#2837

Piotr Słonimski

Piotr Słonimski
#54168
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Piotr Słonimski was a Polish-born French geneticist, pioneer of yeast mitochondrial genetics, nephew of the Polish poet Antoni Słonimski. Biography Słonimski was born in Warsaw in 1922 and he finished "underground" studies of medicine during World War II in occupied Poland. He was a member of the Polish resistance movement and the Armia Krajowa, and he fought during the Warsaw Uprising. According to his own account, he became interested with genetics when he discovered, among ruins of a German police station and while performing an act of sabotage, a German book on the experiments of George ...
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#2838

Lawrence A Loeb

#73708
Overall Influence
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#2839

Neville Hogan

#64096
Overall Influence
Neville Hogan is an Irish-American neuroscientist currently the Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds honorary doctorates from Delft University of Technology and Dublin Institute of Technology.
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#2840

Dan Barouch

#61389
Overall Influence
Dan Hung Barouch is an American physician, immunologist, and virologist. He is known for his work on the pathogenesis and immunology of viral infections and the development of vaccine strategies for global infectious diseases.
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#2841

Steven F. Maier

#73822
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
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#2842

Kornelia Smalla

#59116
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Kornelia Smalla is a chemist and biotechnologist at the Julius Kuehn Institute in Braunschweig and a university lecturer in microbiology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. Life and work After finishing school, Smalla studied chemistry at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and was awarded a chemistry diploma. She became a scientific assistant at the Institute für Biochemistry in the Medical Faculty of the same university and obtained the qualification Dr. rer nat in Biochemistry in 1985, and professorship with Venia Legendi in microbiology in 1999.
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#2843

Umesh Varshney

#34181
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Umesh Varshney is an Indian molecular biologist, academician and the head of a laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He is a J. C. Bose National Fellow of the Department of Science and Technology and is known for his studies on protein synthesis and DNA repair in Escherichia coli and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. An elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences , he is also a recipient of the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Government of India. The Council of Scientific and Indus...
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#2844

Peter Holland

#64227
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Peter William Harold Holland is a zoologist whose research focuses on how the evolution of animal diversity can be explained through evolution of the genome. He is the current Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
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#2845

Daniel Geschwind

#37369
Overall Influence
Daniel H. Geschwind is the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles . He also directs the UCLA Neurogenetics Program and the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment , and holds the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair of Human Genetics there. Since March 1, 2016, he has served as the Senior Associate Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor for Precision Medicine at UCLA. His brother, Michael Geschwind, is also a professor of neurology, and b...
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#2846

Georg F. Striedter

#71456
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Georg F. Striedter is an American scientist and professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of more than 30 papers in evolutionary neuroscience and the author of the book Principles of Brain Evolution. He is also the editor-in-chief of Brain, Behavior and Evolution. Striedter obtained his PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Glenn Northcutt in 1990. He then pursued postdoctoral research at Caltech with Mark Konishi.
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#2847

Renee Borges

#58720
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Renee Maria Borges is an Indian evolutionary biologist and professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science. Her work as a scientist has been profiled on India Today. Her research areas are behavioural and sensory ecology with special reference to plant and animal interactions such as figs and fig-wasps. Other areas of research interest include conservation biology and the history and philosophy of science.
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#2848

Werner Rauh

#58210
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Werner Rauh was a German biologist, botanist and author. Biography Born in the town of Niemegk near Bitterfeld, Rauh studied at Biology faculty at the University of Halle under the morphologist Wilhelm Troll, and received his doctorate in Botany in 1937 before being appointed to the University of Heidelberg two years later. He discovered or described some 1200 genera, species and varieties of plants from Africa, the Americas and Asia. His fields of specialization were the Bromeliads and succulent plants. He was a professor at the University of Heidelberg and Director of the Institute of Plan...
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#2849

Janice E. Clements

Janice E. Clements
#47134
Overall Influence
Janice Ellen Clements is vice dean for faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Mary Wallace Stanton Professor of Faculty Affairs. She is a professor in the departments of Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology, Neurology, and Pathology, and has a joint appointment in molecular biology and genetics. Her molecular biology and virology research examines lentiviruses and how they cause neurological diseases.
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#2850

George Poste

#43874
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
George Henry Poste, CBE FRS, is a former Director of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Career Poste is the Del E. Webb Professor of Health Innovation and Chief Scientist at The Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative at Arizona State University . This program integrates research in genomics, synthetic biology and high performance computing to study the altered regulation of molecular networks in human diseases to develop new diagnostic tests for precision medicine and the remote monitoring of health status using miniaturized body sensors and mobile devices. He assumed this post in 2009.
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