The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#3001
Christopher Lloyd
#27019
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Christopher "Christo" Hamilton Lloyd, OBE was an English gardener and a gardening author of note, as the 20th-century chronicler for thickly planted, labour-intensive country gardening. Life Lloyd was born in Great Dixter, into an upper-middle-class family, the youngest of six children. In 1910, his father, Nathaniel Lloyd, an Arts and Crafts architect, author, printer and designer of posters and other images for confectionery firms,
Go to Profile#3002
Paul Gordon Falkowski
#76247
Overall Influence
#3003
Sarah Tishkoff
#58004
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sarah Anne Tishkoff is an American geneticist and the David and Lyn Silfen Professor in the Department of Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She also serves as a director for the American Society of Human Genetics and is an associate editor at PLOS Genetics, G3 , and Genome Research. She is also a member of the scientific advisory board at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Go to Profile#3004
Elaine Ostrander
#65505
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Elaine Ann Ostrander is an American geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She holds a number of professional academic appointments, currently serving as Distinguished and Senior Investigator and head of the NHGRI Section of Comparative Genomics; and Chief of the Cancer Genetics and Comparative Genomics Branch. She is known for her research on prostate cancer susceptibility in humans and for conducting genetic investigations with the Canis familiaris —the domestic dog— model, which she has used to study disease susceptibility and frequency and other aspects of natural variation across mammals.
Go to Profile#3005
Steven M. Horvath
#76280
Overall Influence
1911 - Present (115 years)
#3006
Julia Clarke
#54555
Overall Influence
Julia Allison Clarke is an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who studies the evolution of birds and the dinosaurs most closely related to living birds. She is the John A. Wilson Professor in Vertebrate Paleontology in the Jackson School of Geosciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#3007
Teri Manolio
#36374
Overall Influence
Teri Ann Manolio is an American physician, epidemiologist, and geneticist. She is director of the Division of Genomic Medicine at the National Human Genome Research Institute , as well as Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. She is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and of the American Heart Association's Council on Epidemiology. She also has a clinical appointment at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Before joining the NHGRI, she worked on large cohort studies, such as the Cardiovascular Health Stu...
Go to Profile#3008
Sue Hartley
#47994
Overall Influence
Susan Elaine Hartley is a British ecologist and is Vice-President for Research at the University of Sheffield. Previously she was director of the York Environmental Sustainability Institute at the University of York and Professor of Ecology at the University of Sussex, specialising in interactions between plants and animals. In December 2009 she delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on The 300 Million Years War, broadcast on More4.
Go to Profile#3009
Éric Buffetaut
#51389
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Éric Buffetaut is a French paleontologist, author and researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique since 1976 where he is a Doctor of Science and Director of Research. Buffetaut is a specialist of fossil archosaurs, mainly dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and has published many books on paleontology. He is one of the major paleontologists to support the thesis of the fall of a meteorite as the main cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
Go to Profile#3010
Carol Tamminga
#55491
Overall Influence
Carol A. Tamminga is an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist, focusing in treating psychotic illnesses, such as schizophrenia, psychotic bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder, currently the Lou and Ellen McGinley Distinguished Chair in Psychiatric Research and the Chief of the Translational Neuroscience Division in Schizophrenia at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She has been Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at UTSW since 2008. She is an Elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine. She serves on the advisory boards of the Brain and Behavioral Research Foundation and of the National Institute of Mental Health .
Go to Profile#3011
Akiko Iwasaki
#72901
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Akiko Iwasaki is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She is also a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research interests include innate immunity, autophagy, inflammasomes, sexually transmitted infections, herpes simplex virus, human papillomavirus, respiratory virus infections, influenza infection, T cell immunity, commensal bacteria, COVID-19 and Long COVID.
Go to Profile#3012
Kai Larsen
#34387
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Kai Larsen was a Danish botanist. Kai Larsen was professor of botany at Århus University, Denmark. He was the Danish editor of Flora Nordica, editor of Flora of Thailand, advisor to Flora of China and executive member of Flora Malesiana.
Go to Profile#3013
John C. Reed
#48357
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
John C. Reed is executive vice president of pharmaceutical research and development at Johnson & Johnson. He was previously the executive vice president and global head of research and development of Sanofi, the global head of pharmaceutical research and early development at Roche, and the chief executive of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, San Diego, California. He was a pioneer in the field of apoptosis particularly with regard to cancer; he was studying oncogenes and discovered that some of them appeared to regulate cell death rather than cell division.
Go to Profile#3014
Alexander Dounce
#56553
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Alexander Latham Dounce was an American professor of biochemistry. Among his fields of study were the isolation and purification of cellular organelles, protein crystallization, enzymes , DNA binding proteins, and the chemical basis of protein synthesis. He also invented the Dounce homogenizer, which was named after him.
Go to Profile#3015
Jörg Freyhof
#49612
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jörg Arthur Freyhof is a German ichthyologist specializing on Old World cypriniform fishes. Freyhof has worked at the Alexander Koenig Research Museum, Bonn, and since 2000 he has been employed at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin.
Go to Profile#3016
Nadia Rosenthal
#48953
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Nadia A. Rosenthal FMedSci is a scientist who specializes in heart development related research. Rosenthal began her undergraduate degree at the University of Wales and then transferred to Harvard. She received her PhD from Harvard Medical School and was an associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School before transferring to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory where she replaced Klaus Rajewsky who had just gone to work at Harvard Medical School. In 2006, she presented the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Holiday Lectures together with Douglas A.
Go to Profile#3017
Roger C. L. Guillemin
#76450
Overall Influence
#3018
Greg Asner
#69156
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Gregory P. Asner is an American ecologist whose global work has focused on ecosystems, conservation, and climate sciences. He has developed technology to access and analyze large amounts of data about ecosystems, including assessing carbon emissions, coral reef resilience, and biodiversity. He is the founder of the Global Airborne Observatory and the creator of Carnegie Landsat Analysis System and CLASlite. Since 2019, he has been the Director of Arizona State University's Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science. He is also managing director of the Allen Coral Atlas, an online m...
Go to Profile#3019
David Henry Pashley
#76460
Overall Influence
#3020
Rex Malcolm Chaplin Dawson
#67402
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Rex Malcolm Chaplin Dawson FRS was a British biochemist whose research was primarily dedicated to the study of phospholipids. His career was based at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, starting in 1955, in the newly formed biochemistry department.
Go to Profile#3021
Titus Hendrik Jan Huisman
#76477
Overall Influence
#3022
Ronald Germain
#75556
Overall Influence
Ronald N. Germain is a scientist at the National Institutes of Health . He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016.
Go to Profile#3023
Agnes Wold
#28011
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Agnes Wold, born January 7, 1955, is a professor of clinical bacteriology specializing in the normal flora of the body, at the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a nationally known commentator on television, radio and in newspapers on issues related to infectious disease and women in science.
Go to Profile#3024
Wanda Półtawska
#17423
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (105 years)
Wanda Wiktoria Półtawska was a Polish physician, author, Holocaust survivor and pro-life activist. Biography Wanda Wiktoria Półtawska was born in Lublin, Poland on 2 November 1921. During World War II, she was interred at Ravensbrück concentration camp, just north of Berlin, having been arrested in February 1941 and charged with assisting the Polish resistance movement. She was used as a human guinea pig and became the subject of various medical experiments. She spent four years in the camp and afterwards wrote an account of her experiences, And I Am Afraid of My Dreams. In 1947 she married p...
Go to Profile#3025
Giorgio Vallortigara
#46631
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Giorgio Vallortigara is an Italian neuroscientist. Biography In 1983 he graduated in experimental psychology from the University of Padua, where he also obtained his research doctorate in 1990. In 1991 he moved to the University of Sussex, with a post-doctoral scholarship. found cerebral lateralization in lower vertebrates, such as fish and amphibians. Many of his articles have been published in Nature, Science, Current Biology, PNAS.
Go to Profile#3026
Rivka Carmi
#20431
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Rivka Carmi is an Israeli pediatrician and geneticist. She served as President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev from May 2006 until December 2018. Carmi is the first woman to be appointed president of an Israeli university.
Go to Profile#3027
Howard Y. Chang
#76571
Overall Influence
#3028
Jens Overgaard
#76579
Overall Influence
#3029
Miriam Merad
#55727
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Miram Merad is a French-Algerian professor in Cancer immunology and the Director of the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, NY. She is the corecipient of the 2018 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic Immunology and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#3030
Cesare Montecucco
#64790
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Cesare Montecucco is an Italian pathologist and full professor at University of Padua, Italy. He was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in 2011 for his research on tetanus, botulism, anthrax and Helicobacter pylori-related diseases.
Go to Profile#3031
Valeria Souza
#69400
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Valeria Francisca Eugenia Leopoldina de María de Guadalupe Souza Saldívar is a Mexican scientist who specializes in evolutionary and microbial ecology. She is a senior researcher in the Department of Evolutionary Ecology of the Institute of Ecology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a level III researcher in the National System of Researchers. She was the former president of the Scientific Society of Ecology of Mexico.
Go to Profile#3032
Shirley Hodgson
#19435
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Shirley Victoria Penrose Hodgson, FRCP, FRSB is a British geneticist. Biography Hodgson studied at Somerville College, Oxford. She worked as a GP, then performed as a locum in clinical genetics at Guy's Hospital, saying she found the subject "irresistible". She became Senior Registrar in Clinical Genetics for the South Thames Regional Genetics Centre and Honorary Senior Registrar at Hammersmith Hospital, London, from 1983 to 1988; then Consultant Geneticist at Addenbrooke's Hospital from 1988 to 1990. In the 1990s, she led the regional cancer genetics service at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital...
Go to Profile#3033
Kathryn Virginia Anderson
#72746
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Kathryn Virginia Anderson was an American developmental biologist researching about the various gene and protein interactions that guide the process of embryogenesis and especially neurulation. Early life and education Anderson was born in La Jolla, San Diego in 1952. She was schooled at Point Loma High School and she has ascribed her interest in biological sciences to its biology teacher and parents. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley in biochemistry. In 1973, she began her post-graduate studies in neurodevelopment at Stanford University and left after 2 years.
Go to Profile#3034
Scott V. Edwards
#59267
Overall Influence
Scott Vernon Edwards is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the Curator of Ornithology at Harvard's associated museum, the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Go to Profile#3035
Albert Schwartz
#24624
Overall Influence
1923 - 1992 (69 years)
Albert Schwartz was an American zoologist who worked extensively with the herpetofauna of Florida and the West Indies, and later with butterflies. One magazine article once dubbed him as one of the "Kings of West Indian Anole Taxonomy".
Go to Profile#3036
Jonathan Ball
#76300
Overall Influence
Jonathan Kelvin Ball is professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham. His research relates to emerging viruses, viral vaccines and treatments, and blood-borne infections. He is also director of the Centre for Global Virus Research at the University of Nottingham.
Go to Profile#3037
Erica Ollmann Saphire
#46855
Overall Influence
Erica Ollmann Saphire is an American structural biologist and immunologist and a professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Her research investigates the structural biology of viruses that cause hemorrhagic fever such as Ebola, Sudan, Marburg, Bundibugyo, and Lassa. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2008.
Go to Profile#3038
Karen Steel
#47603
Overall Influence
Karen Penelope Steel FRS FMedSci is a British scientist who studies the genetics of deafness, using the mouse as a model to identify the genes involved and to understand the molecular, cellular and physiological mechanisms involved. She is Professor of Sensory Function at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases, King's College London. Previously she was Principal Investigator of the Genetics of Deafness research programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Go to Profile#3039
Leonard R. Brand
#52826
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Leonard Brand is a Seventh-day Adventist creationist, biologist, paleontologist, and author. He is a professor and past chair of Loma Linda University Department of Earth and Biological Sciences. As a Creationist, he teaches interventionism, a view of history that holds that there is intelligent intervention in history. His desire for respectful dialogue has been welcomed by advocates on both sides of the creation–evolution controversy. He challenges his fellow creationists to use caution when making scientific claims.
Go to Profile#3040
Peter Franz Riederer
#76678
Overall Influence
#3041
Tsuneo Omura
#76721
Overall Influence
#3042
Jeremy Kirk Nicholson
#76753
Overall Influence
#3043
Harold Paul Morris
#76765
Overall Influence
#3044
Nessa Carey
#61148
Overall Influence
Nessa Carey is a British biologist working in the field of molecular biology and biotechnology. She is International Director of the technology transfer organization PraxisUnico and a visiting professor at Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#3045
Tamara B. Haugen Harris
#76836
Overall Influence
#3046
Linda Saif
#65178
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Linda J. Saif is an American microbial scientist who works at Ohio State University. In 2015, she became the first female recipient of the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for her research in virology and immunology.
Go to Profile#3047
David R. Lindberg
#66278
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David R. Lindberg is an American malacologist and professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Curator for the University of California Museum of Paleontology and co-editor of the journal Molecular Systematics and Phylogeography of Mollusks.
Go to Profile#3048
Israel Hanukoglu
#30636
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Israel Hanukoglu is a Turkish-born Israeli scientist. He is a full professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Ariel University and former science and technology adviser to the prime minister of Israel . He is founder of Israel Science and Technology Directory.
Go to Profile#3049
Satish Chandra Maheshwari
#60005
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Satish Chandra Maheshwari was an Indian botanist and a former professor at the University of Delhi. He is known for his contributions to the fields of plant physiology and plant molecular biology. Maheshwari is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1972, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Go to Profile#3050
Paul Kubes
#76921
Overall Influence
