Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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

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

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School

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Subdiscipline

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#2851

Valerie Mizrahi

#53521

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Valerie Mizrahi is a South African molecular biologist. Biography The daughter of Morris and Etty Mizrahi, she was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and was educated there. Her family is a Sephardi Jewish family from the Greek island of Rhodes.

#2852

Klaus Peter Sauer

#59626

Overall Influence

1941 - 2022 (81 years)

Klaus Peter Sauer was a German evolutionary biologist and ecologist. Biography After graduating from the in Giessen, Sauer studied biology, genetics, chemistry, and mathematics at the University of Giessen. From 1969 to 1971, he was a research assistant at Giessen and from 1971 to 1979, a research assistant of Günther Osche at the University of Freiburg. In 1979, he was appointed chair of evolutionary research at Bielefeld University.

#2853

Paul Silva

#47161

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Paul Claude Silva was a phycologist, marine biologist, and algal taxonomist considered to be the world's leading expert in the chlorophyte green algal genus Codium. Silva was also an expert in botanical nomenclature and was an editor of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature's Eighth through Sixteenth International Botanical Congresses.

#2854

Laura Landweber

#56323

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Laura Faye Landweber is an American evolutionary biologist. , she is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of biological sciences at Columbia University. Previously, she was a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. She specializes in RNA-mediated epigenetic inheritance and molecular evolution.

#2855

Mariano Yogore

#65642

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Dr. Mariano G. Yogore, Jr. was a Filipino microbiologist. He studied at the University of the Philippines in 1945 and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948. Yogore was a research associate and professor of parasitology at the University of Chicago from 1969–1986. Prior to that, he was research associate and associate professor at the University of Chicago from 1967–1969. He also served as USPHS research fellow at the Department Microbiology at the University of Chicago between 1959 and 1961.

#2856

Timothy R. Parsons

#69238

Overall Influence

1932 - 2022 (90 years)

Timothy Richard Parsons, was a Canadian oceanographer and the first Canadian to receive a Japan Prize. Background and career Tim Parsons was born in Colombo, Ceylon, and received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1953, a Master of Science degree in 1955, and a Ph.D. in 1958 all, from McGill University. He began his research career at the federal government's Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, British Columbia, before becoming a Professor of Oceanography at the University of British Columbia from 1972 until his retirement in 1992, and subsequently an Honorary Research Scientist at the Insti...

#2857

Lu Chen

#45517

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Lu Chen is a Chinese-born American neuroscientist, who is a Professor of Neurosurgery, and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and is a member of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. She was previously an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

#2858

Rachel Yehuda

#24852

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Rachel Yehuda is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, the vice chair for veterans affairs in the psychiatry department, and the director of the traumatic stress studies division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She also leads the PTSD clinical research program at the neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology laboratory at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center. In 2020 she became director of the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at Mount Sinai.

#2859

Xuemei Chen

#70823

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Xuemei Chen is a Chinese-American molecular biologist. She is the Furuta Chair Professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. She was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

#2860

Arthur Weiss

#71421

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Arthur Weiss is an American Immunologist who is currently an Ephraim P. Engleman Distinguished Professor of Medicine and a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2003. He specializes in studying T cell development and immune responses. His research focus has recently been shifted towards studying autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, a title he has held since 1982.

#2861

Jürgen Knoblich

#61378

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Jürgen Knoblich is a German molecular biologist. Since 2018, he is the interim Scientific Director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Education and career Knoblich studied Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and Molecular Biology at University College London. In 1989 he transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, where he completed his doctoral thesis in 1994 on the role of Cyclin proteins in controlling cell cycle progression during development. In 1994 he became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, where he worked with Dr.

#2862

Anne Magurran

#73076

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Anne Elizabeth Magurran is a British Professor of ecology at University of St Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of several books on measuring biological diversity, and the importance for quantifying biodiversity for conservation. She has won numerous awards and honors, is regularly consulted for global assessments and analyses of biodiversity and conservation and her research is often highlighted by journalists.

#2863

Rémi Quirion

#60661

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Rémi Quirion, is a Canadian scientist. He is the first Chief Scientist of Quebec. Born in Lac-Drolet, Quebec, Quirion received a Ph.D. from Université de Sherbrooke in 1980. He was a Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and Scientific Director of the Douglas Hospital Research Centre.

#2864

Ira Tabas

#72822

Overall Influence

Ira Tabas is an American molecular biologist who currently serves as Richard J. Stock Professor and Vice-Chair of Research in the Department of Medicine, Professor of Anatomy & Cell Biology at Columbia University in the City of New York, and an endocrinologist affiliated with NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital .

#2865

Laurent Itti

#27486

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Laurent Itti is a computational neuroscientist. He received his MS in image processing from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Paris in 1994, and a PhD in computation and neural systems from Caltech in 2000. He is currently an associate professor of computer science, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he has been since 2000.

#2866

Pedro Pedrosa Mendes

Pedro Pedrosa Mendes

#41089

Overall Influence

Pedro Pedrosa Mendes is a professor of computational systems biology in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology , the Machine Learning and Optimization group. He is also a professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

#2867

Ruth Bishop

#28455

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Ruth Frances Bishop was an Australian virologist, who was a leading member of the team that discovered the human rotavirus. Biography Bishop was born in Dandenong, Victoria, and grew up in Frankston where her father was principal of Frankston High School.

#2868

Ben Garrod

#65169

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Ben Garrod is an English evolutionary biologist, primatologist and broadcaster. He has been Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Science Engagement at the University of East Anglia since 2019. Early life Garrod was born in Great Yarmouth, where he lived in the Elephant and Castle pub and attended East Norfolk Sixth Form College. , his parents are stewards at Great Yarmouth and Caister Golf Club.

#2869

Stuart Cull-Candy

Stuart Cull-Candy

#44406

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Stuart Graham Cull-Candy is a British neuroscientist. He holds the Gaddum Chair of Pharmacology and a personal Chair in Neuroscience at University College London. He is also a member of the Faculty of 1000 and held a Royal Society - Wolfson Research position.

#2870

Michael Neale

#69420

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Michael C. Neale is a British behavior geneticist and professor at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is known for his research in the field of psychiatric genetics, which aims to determine the roles of genetic and environmental factors in psychiatric disorders and substance abuse. He is estimated to have mentored over 2,000 students in his field. He was president of the Behavior Genetics Association from 2009 to 2010.

#2871

Theunis Piersma

#34901

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Theunis Piersma is a Dutch ornithologist, ecologist, and educator. He is among the most influential ornithologists, particularly in the wader bird area, in the world. He specifically looks at waders and correlations between flock size and distribution, climate, food, predators, pathogens, and their historical-genetic background. RTV Drenthe referred to him in 2012 as the "first migratory bird professor in the world."

#2872

Pedro Willem Crous

#61784

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Pedro Willem Crous is a South African mycologist and plant pathologist. Study In 1985 he obtained a B.Sc. in forestry at the University of Stellenbosch. In 1988 he obtained his M.Sc.Agric. cum laude at the same university. In 1992 he was awarded a Ph.D. in agriculture at the University of the Orange Free State in Bloemfontein. In 2009 he was awarded a D.Sc. in fungal systematics at the University of Pretoria .

#2873

James Haber

#67015

Overall Influence

James E. Haber is an American molecular biologist known for discoveries in the field of DNA repair, in particular for his contributions to understanding the mechanisms of non-homologous end joining and microhomology-mediated end joining, as well as homologous recombination.

#2874

David A. Cheresh

#74325

Overall Influence

David Cheresh is a Michigan-born scientist who studies angiogenesis and cancer metastasis. His early research focused on the function of integrins, cellular receptors for the extracellular matrix, in cell migration and survival. His current work is on signaling aspects of cell invasion by vascular cells and tumor cells, with a focus on preventing tumor metastasis.

#2875

Jian-Kang Zhu

#69940

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Jian-Kang Zhu is a plant scientist, researcher and academic. He is a Senior Principal Investigator in the Shanghai Center for Plant Stress Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences . He is also the Academic Director of CAS Center of Excellence in Plant Sciences.

#2876

Harold Ginsberg

#70994

Overall Influence

1917 - 2003 (86 years)

Harold Samuel "Harry" Ginsberg was an American microbiologist who made early discoveries in virology and infectious disease. Ginsberg was born on May 27, 1917, in Daytona Beach, Florida. He earned his undergraduate degree from Duke University in 1937 and received his medical degree from the Tulane University School of Medicine in 1941.

#2877

Shenggen Fan

#26719

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Shenggen Fan was the Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute between 2009 and 2019. He is known for his work on transition economies and rural development in China. His research has focused on analysis of the role of public and private investments in agriculture and public infrastructure in the fight against chronic poverty and hunger. In addition to his work on his home country, he has also worked extensively in other Asian countries, and East Africa.

#2878

Thomas R. Odhiambo

#41923

Overall Influence

1931 - 2003 (72 years)

Professor Thomas Risley Odhiambo was a Kenyan entomologist and environmental activist who directed research and scientific development in Africa. Life and education Odhiambo was educated at Maseno School in Kenya, Makerere University in Uganda and Queens' College, Cambridge in United Kingdom.

#2879

Huntington Willard

#60643

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Huntington Faxon Willard is an American geneticist. In 2014, he was named to head the Marine Biological Laboratory, and is a professor in human genetics at the University of Chicago. He stepped down from leading the lab in 2017 to return to research. Willard was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2016. Earlier, beginning in 2003 he was the Nanaline H. Duke Professor of Genome Sciences, the first director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and Vice Chancellor for Genome Sciences at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

#2880

Lincoln Brower

#59385

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Lincoln Pierson Brower was an American entomologist and ecologist, known for his work on monarch butterflies, chemical ecology and conservation. Life Brower was born to Bailey and Helen Pierson Brower in Madison, New Jersey, in 1931. He was raised in Chatham Township, New Jersey, where he showed interest in butterflies. In an oral history, he recalled being punished at school, being made to sit all day for skipping a class to go out and collect a species of moth; asked whether it was worth it, he stated "Absolutely".

#2881

Hanna Kokko

#42197

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Hanna Kokko is a scientist and full professor at the University of Zurich. She works in the fields of evolution and ecology and is known for her research on the evolution and maintenance of sex, the feedback between ecology and evolution, and the evolutionary ecology of cancer.

#2882

Peter C. Whybrow

#39501

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Peter C. Whybrow is an English psychiatrist and award-winning author whose primary research focus has been on understanding the metabolic role of thyroid hormones in the adult brain and how to apply this knowledge to the treatment of mood disorder, especially bipolar disorder. He is Judson Braun Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

#2883

Alejandro Estrada

#42812

Overall Influence

Alejandro Estrada is a primatologist and the author and editor of several books and articles about primates. He is a research scientist at the field research station Los Tuxtlas of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico He was the founder and executive editor of Tropical Conservation Science. Books he has authored or edited include New Perspectives in the Study of Mesoamerican Primates: Distribution, Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation , Frugivores and Seed Dispersal: Ecological and Evolutionary Aspects , Las Selvas Tropicales Humedas de Mexico: Recurso Poderoso pero Vulnerable and Comportam...

#2884

K. Ullas Karanth

K. Ullas Karanth

#27567

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Kota Ullas Karanth is a conservation zoologist and a leading tiger expert based in Karnataka, India. He was the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's India Programme. He is notable for pioneering the scientific use of camera traps in population density studies of large wild mammals in India. He was a Senior Conservation Scientist with the New York based Wildlife Conservation Society and Technical Director of the WCS Tiger Conservation Program.

#2885

Richard W. Aldrich

#61710

Overall Influence

Richard Warren Aldrich is an American neuroscientist who is currently the Karl Folkers Chair of Interdisciplinary Medical Research and Professor of Neurobiology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas.

#2886

Joan W. Bennett

Joan W. Bennett

#56925

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Joan Wennstrom Bennett is a fungal geneticist who also is active in issues concerning women in science. Educated at Upsala College and the University of Chicago , she was on the faculty of Tulane University for 35 years. She is a past president of the American Society for Microbiology and of the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology , and past Editor in Chief of Mycologia . She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.

#2887

Bevil Conway

#47351

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Bevil Conway , is a Zimbabwean neuroscientist, visual artist, and an expert in color. Conway specialises in visual perception in his scientific work, and he often explores the limitations of the visual system in his artwork. At Wellesley College, Conway was Knafel Assistant Professor of Natural Science from 2007 to 2011, and associate professor of Neuroscience until 2016. He was a founding member of the Neuroscience Department at ey. Prior to joining the Wellesley faculty, Conway helped establish the Kathmandu University Medical School in Nepal, where he taught as assistant professor in 2002–03.

#2888

Peter Cresswell

#56517

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Peter Cresswell FRS is a British immunologist, and Eugene Higgins Professor of Immunobiology and Professor of Cell Biology and of Dermatology, at Yale School of Medicine. His lab primary focuses on the molecular mechanisms of antigen processing particularly the functions of the major histocompatibility complex molecules and CD1 molecules. He is most notable for discovering and identifying the MHC class II molecules and viperin.

#2889

Ho Wang Lee

#49905

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

Ho Wang Lee was a South Korean physician, epidemiologist, and virologist. He was the first person in the history of medicine to be the one chiefly responsible for all 3 of the following steps: discovery of the virus causing a human disease, development of a method of diagnosis for the disease, and development of a vaccine against the disease.

#2890

Rudi Balling

#58205

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Rudi Balling is a German geneticist. He is the founding director of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine at the University of Luxembourg He has served as president of the International Mammalian Genome Society and as co-editor of the Annual Review of Nutrition since 2018. In 2016 Balling received Luxembourg's Ordre de Mérite from Prime Minister Xavier Bettel.

#2891

Ray F. Smith

#60563

Overall Influence

1919 - 1999 (80 years)

Ray Fred Smith was an American agronomist and entomologist whose research focused on biological methods of arthropod pest management. He was a chair of the Entomology Department at the University of California at Berkeley from 1959 to 1973. He was an editor of the Annual Review of Entomology from 1960 to 1977.

#2892

Terri Attwood

#43099

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Teresa K. Attwood is a professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Computer Science and School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester and a visiting fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute . She held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at University College London from 1993 to 1999 and at the University of Manchester from 1999 to 2002.

#2893

Eugene Goldwasser

#48882

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Eugene Goldwasser was an American biochemist at the University of Chicago who identified erythropoietin, a hormone that plays a vital role in the synthesis of red blood cells. After sharing the minute quantities that he had been able to isolate with researchers at the biotechnology firm Amgen, that company was able to use genetic engineering technology to produce useful amounts of erythropoietin as a drug to treat anemia that has achieved substantial financial success, but that has also been used by athletes as a performance-enhancing drug.

#2894

Raymond C. Stevens

#29515

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Raymond C. Stevens is an American chemist and structural biologist, Founder, CEO and Board Member of Structure Therapeutics; Founding Director of the at ShanghaiTech University; Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, and Founding Director of the Bridge Institute at the University of Southern California; Board Member, Danaher Corporation.

#2895

Chris Perrins

#51043

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Christopher Miles Perrins, is Emeritus Fellow of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and Her Majesty's Warden of the Swans since 1993.

#2896

Ranajit Chakraborty

Ranajit Chakraborty

#46005

Overall Influence

1946 - 2018 (72 years)

Ranajit Chakraborty was a human and population geneticist. At the time of his death, he was Director of the Center for Computational Genomics at the Institute of Applied Genetics and Professor in the Department of Forensic and Investigative Genetics at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth, Texas. His scientific contributions include studies in human genetics, population genetics, genetic epidemiology, statistical genetics, and forensic genetics.

#2897

Tim Stearns

#68879

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Tim Stearns is an American biologist and university administrator, and is the Dean of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies, Vice President of Education, and Head of Laboratory at The Rockefeller University. Stearns was formerly the Frank Lee and Carol Hall Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, with appointments in the Department of Genetics and the Cancer Center in the Stanford Medical School. Stearns served as chair of the Department of Biology at Stanford as well as Acting Dean of Research and Senior Associate Vice Provost of Research. Stearns is an HHMI Professor, and is a member of JASON, a scientific advisory group.

#2898

Donna Baird

#41852

Overall Influence

Donna Day Baird is an American epidemiologist and evolutionary-population biologist. She is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. She is known for her research in reproductive health through NIEHS.

#2899

Elodie Ghedin

#51882

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Elodie Ghedin is a Canadian parasitologist and virologist as well as a professor at the New York University Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. Her work focuses on the molecular biology and genomics of the parasites that cause diseases such as elephantiasis, and river blindness, and on the evolution of the influenza virus. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, a 2012 Kavli Frontier of Science Fellow, and a 2017 American Academy of Microbiology Fellow. She also was Awarded the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award in 2010.

#2900

Brian Alters

#14511

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Brian J. Alters is a Canadian academic who is a professor in Chapman University's College of Educational Studies. He directs Chapman's Evolution Education Research Center, has taught science education at both Harvard and McGill Universities, and is regarded as a specialist in evolution education.

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