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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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#3101

Terence Rabbitts

Terence Rabbitts

#43953

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Terence Howard Rabbitts FRS FMedSci is currently Professor of Molecular Immunology at the Institute of Cancer Research, London. Education He was educated at John Ruskin Grammar School, the University of East Anglia where he graduated with a BSc with first class honours in Biological Sciences, and subsequently completed his PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London.

#3102

Mary Jane West-Eberhard

#41943

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Mary Jane West-Eberhard is an American theoretical biologist noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping animal evolution and speciation. She is also an entomologist notable for her work on the behavior and evolution of social waspss.

#3103

Preston Estep

#39607

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Preston "Pete" Wayne Estep III is an American biologist and science and technology advocate. He is a graduate of Cornell University, where he did neuroscience research, and he earned a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University. He did his doctoral research in the laboratory of genomics pioneer Professor George M. Church at Harvard Medical School.

#3104

Corinne Le Quéré

Corinne Le Quéré

#31157

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Marie Corinne Lyne Le Quéré is a Canadian scientist. She is Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at the University of East Anglia and former Director of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. She is the chair of the French High Council on Climate and member of the UK Climate Change Committee. Her research focuses on the interactions between the carbon cycle and climate change.

#3105

John Bohannon

#11996

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

John Bohannon is an American science journalist and scientist who is Director of Science at Primer, an artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, California. He is known for his career prior to Primer as a science journalist and Harvard University biologist, most notably with his "Gonzo Scientist" online series at Science Magazine and his creation of the annual "Dance Your PhD" contest. His investigative journalism work includes:critiquing the Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties uncovering serious problems with the peer review process at a large number of journals that c...

#3106

Costantino Iadecola

#77695

Overall Influence

#3107

Dianne Edwards

#61840

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Professor Dianne Edwards CBE, FRS, FRSE, FLS, FLSW is a palaeobotanist, who studies the colonisation of land by plants, and early land plant interactions. Early life Edwards was born in Swansea, South Wales, and spent much of her time at her parents' bungalow on the Gower Peninsula.

#3108

David Meyer Jacobowitz

#77720

Overall Influence

#3109

Binghui Shen

#69923

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Binghui Shen , is an American radiobiologist. He is currently the Chair and Professor of Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics at City of Hope National Medical Center. He graduated BSc from Department of Biology of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou in 1983. From 1983 to 1986, Shen was an assistant in the Department of Agricultural Sciences at Zhejiang Agricultural University . Shen obtained his PhD from Kansas State University. Shen did his postdoctoral research first in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California, Irvine, then in the Life Sciences Division of...

#3110

Guoyao Wu

#73391

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Guoyao Wu is a Chinese-American animal scientist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Animal Science at Texas A&M University and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . Biography Wu received an undergraduate degree in Animal Science from the South China Agricultural University, then a master's degree in Animal Nutrition from China Agricultural University . He earned master's and Ph.D. degrees in Animal Biochemistry from the University of Alberta, Canada. He completed postdoctoral research in Nutrition and Metabolism at McGill University Faculty of Medicine and in Biochemistry at Memorial University of Newfoundland Faculty of Medicine in Canada.

#3111

Mike Wingfield

#64371

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Professor Michael John Wingfield is a South African academic and scientist who studies plant pathology and biological control. He was the founding director of the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute, University of Pretoria. Wingfield has authored or co-authored over 1,000 scientific publications and is considered a leading expert in the field of forest health and invasive species. He has received numerous awards and honours throughout his career, including Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award and John Herschel Medal, the highest accolade from the Royal Society of South Africa. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and the African Academy of Sciences.

#3112

Jonathan A. Campbell

#31340

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Jonathan Atwood Campbell is an American herpetologist. He is currently professor of biology at University of Texas at Arlington. He was a distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Biology, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas.

#3113

F. Herbert Bormann

#55694

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

F. Herbert Bormann was an American plant ecologist whose 1971 research within the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire with fellow scientists was credited with the discovery of acid rain. His research was one of the major contributory factors towards changes made in the United States' Clean Air Act in 1990. In 1993 he was awarded the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and in 2003 he received the Blue Planet Prize, both awards alongside his colleague Gene Likens. His publications include 8 books and more than 200 journal articles.

#3114

Wulfram Gerstner

#40879

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Wulfram Gerstner is a German and Swiss computational neuroscientist. His research focuses on neural spiking patterns in neural networks, and their connection to learning, spatial representation and navigation. Since 2006 Gerstner has been a full professor of Computer Science and Life Sciences at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , where he also serves as a Director of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience.

#3115

Gian Luigi Gessa

Gian Luigi Gessa

#61399

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Gian Luigi Gessa is a professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at the University of Cagliari, where he has led for a long time the Department of Neurosciences. He is the leader of the Italian group that studies drug addiction. He also directed the research groups of the National Research Council.

#3116

Soottawat Benjakul

#77857

Overall Influence

#3117

Mary Morgan-Richards

Mary Morgan-Richards

#27045

Overall Influence

Mary Morgan-Richards is a New Zealand biologist, and as of 2019 is a full professor at Massey University. Academic career In 1995, Morgan-Richard's completed a PhD thesis titled 'Weta Karyotypes: the Systematic Significance of Their Variation' at the Victoria University of Wellington. Between 1996 and 2003, she worked at the University of St Andrews, University of Otago, the Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Canterbury successively. In 2005 Morgan-Richards moved to the Massey University, rising to full professor in 2018.

#3118

Paulo Saldiva

#49993

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Paulo Hilário Nascimento Saldiva is a Brazilian professor, physician, pathologist and medical researcher. He researches particularly on the academic area of pathophysiology of the lungs and the hazardous consequences of air pollution for human health. He is a member of the World Health Organization and is a researcher of the Department of Environmental Health of Harvard University, and has co-authored the book "Saúde e Meio Ambiente: o desafio das metrópoles" , released in 2011. Saldiva graduated and obtained a bachelor's degree by the department of Medicine of the Universidade de São Paulo in 1977 and a Doctor's Degree in Pathology in 1983, among other academic accomplishments.

#3119

Paul Workman

#56424

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Paul Workman is a British scientist noted for his work on the discovery and development of pharmaceutical agents in the field of oncology. He is President and CEO of The Institute of Cancer Research In London.

#3120

John Abelson

#52569

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

John Norman Abelson is an American molecular biologist with expertise in biophysics, biochemistry, and genetics. He was a professor at the California Institute of Technology . Biography Abelson graduated in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in physics from Washington State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 1965. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship in biochemistry at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics Division, Cambridge, England, where he worked with Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick on the mechanism of nonsense suppressors in E.coli.

#3121

Andrea Shundi

#55244

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Andrea Shundi is an Albanian-American agronomist of the 20th and 21st century. His academic research and publications focus mainly on the forage systems as a source feeding of the livestock, on viticulture and viniculture, and also on the history of the Albanian agriculture.

#3122

Cyril Ponnamperuma

Cyril Ponnamperuma

#48166

Overall Influence

1923 - 1994 (71 years)

Cyril Ponnamperuna was a Sri Lankan scientist known internationally for his work promoting science and researching for distinguished organizations. Ponnamperuma obtained his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Madras and his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the . He then moved to the United States where he pursued his doctorate in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduation he began working for NASA and was influential with Project Apollo and the Viking and Voyager programs. Arthur C. Clarke had a great respect for Ponnamperuma and he was eventually named as the first director of the Arthur C.

#3123

Benjamin Halpern

#50827

Overall Influence

Benjamin S. Halpern is a marine biologist and ecologist currently working at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was the recipient of the 2016 A.G. Huntsman Award for Excellence in the Marine Sciences.

#3124

John Jr. Ross

#77947

Overall Influence

#3125

Peter Jahrling

#20798

Overall Influence

Peter B. Jahrling is chief of the Emerging Viral Pathogens Section of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Jahrling received his PhD in medical microbiology from Cornell Medical College. He joined the military as an officer at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases , and remained employed as a civilian after his service. Since 2005, Jahrling has been the chief scientist of the NIAID Integrated Research Facility in Frederick, Maryland, and chief of the Emerging Viral Pathogens Section.

#3126

Christophe Dessimoz

Christophe Dessimoz

#64411

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Christophe Dessimoz is a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the University of Lausanne, Associate Professor at University College London and a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology. Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, along with Ron Appel.

#3127

Michelle A. Petri

#77977

Overall Influence

#3128

Mathias Uhlén

#73181

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Mathias Uhlén is a Swedish scientist and Professor of Microbiology at Royal Institute of Technology , Stockholm. After a post-doc period at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, he became professor in microbiology at KTH in 1988. His research is focused on protein science, antibody engineering and precision medicine and range from basic research in human and microbial biology to more applied research, including clinical applications. He is member of several academies and societies, including Royal Swedish Academy of Science , National Academy of Engineering and the Swedish Academy of Engineering Science .

#3129

Victor J. Hruby

#78071

Overall Influence

#3130

Erika L. Pearce

#48854

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Erika L. Pearce is an American immunologist. She is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University after serving as director and a scientific member at Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany. Her work investigates the connection between metabolism and immune cell function with a particular focus on the regulation of T-cells. In 2018, she was awarded the Leibniz Prize for her "outstanding work in metabolism and inflammation research."

#3131

Robert W. Mahley

#78083

Overall Influence

#3132

Helen Asemota

#27621

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Helen Nosakhare Asemota is a biochemist and agricultural biotechnologist based in Jamaica. She is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Director of the Biotechnology Centre at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Her research develops biotechnology strategies for production and improvement of tropical tuber crops. She is notable for leading large international biotechnology collaborations, as well as for acting as an international biotechnology consultant for the United Nations .

#3133

Charles F. Code

#78095

Overall Influence

#3134

Mike Archer

#56183

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Professor Michael Archer AM, FAA, Dist FRSN is an Australian paleontologist specialising in Australian vertebrates. He is a professor at the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales. His previous appointments include Director of the Australian Museum 1999–2004 and Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales 2004–2009.

#3135

Charles R. R. Watson

#78119

Overall Influence

#3136

Rifat Hadžiselimović

#40341

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Academician Rifat Hadžiselimović is a Bosnian geneticist. He was born in Šiprage, Bosnia and Herzegovina on 7 January 1944. In 2013, with over 45 years of service, he was appointed Emeritus. He acts as scientific adviser in Institute for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Sarajevo.

#3137

Gordon Ada

#53383

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Gordon Leslie Ada AO, FAA was an Australian biochemist best known for his seminal contributions to virology and immunology and his long leadership of the Department of Microbiology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, where Peter C. Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel performed their Nobel winning research in his department. Both Zinkernagel and Doherty held him in high regard, and he was invited by them to attend the Nobel award ceremony and dinner in Stockholm.

#3138

Geoffrey Boxshall

#64931

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Geoffrey Allan Boxshall FRS is a British zoologist, and Merit researcher at the Natural History Museum, working primarily on copepods. Early life Son of Jack Boxshall a Canadian bank manager and Sybil Boxshall , a civil servant in the procurement department of the Ministry of Defence. He was educated at Churcher's College, Petersfield from 1961 to 1968. He was Vice Captain of College 1967–1968 and Captain of the Hockey XI 1968. He played rugby for Hampshire County in both the 1966–1967 and 1967–1968 seasons.

#3139

William DeGrado

#55019

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

William DeGrado is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, where he is the Toby Herfindal Presidential Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. As an early pioneer of protein design, he coined the term de novo protein design. He is also active in discovery of small molecule drugs for a variety of human diseases. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences , American Academy of Arts & Sciences and National Academy of Inventors. He also is a scientific cofounder of Pliant therapeutics.

#3140

Cathy Drennan

#45790

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Catherine Drennan is an American biochemist and crystallographer. She is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biochemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

#3141

Isaac Berenblum

Isaac Berenblum

#77273

Overall Influence

1903 - 2000 (97 years)

Isaac Berenblum, was an Israeli biochemist, who in 1947 proposed that cancers need another trigger to grow besides mutated DNA. Awards In 1974, Berenblum was awarded the Israel Prize, in life science.In 1980, he received the Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize given by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.

#3142

Marie Åsberg

#40505

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Marie Åsberg is a Swedish psychiatrist. She was based at the Karolinska Institute until retirement in 2004. In a pioneering 1976 paper, Åsberg found a link between low serotonin and violent suicide.

#3143

Valerie Daggett

#36850

Overall Influence

Valerie Daggett is a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States. Education and career Daggett has a B.S. from Reed College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, advised by Irwin Kuntz and Peter Kollman, and subsequently held a postdoctoral position at Stanford University with Michael Levitt, a co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

#3144

Per E. Ahlberg

#65293

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Per Erik Ahlberg is a Swedish palaeontologist working with the earliest tetrapods. He took his Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Cambridge in 1989 under English palaeontologist Jenny Clack. He is currently professor at the Department of Organismal Biology, University of Uppsala. He has collaborated with Clack on a number of projects.

#3145

Shoshana Wodak

#65229

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Shoshana Wodak is a computational biologist and an organizational leader in the field of protein-protein docking. Wodak was one of the first people to dock proteins together using a computer program.

#3146

Shahid Jameel

#43347

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Shahid Jameel is an Indian virologist and academic. Dr. Jameel is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Fellow at Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and Research Fellow, Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. He serves as the Principal Investigator for the Centre's project on Public Health, Science and Technology in Muslim societies. Previously he was the director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences since its inception in the year 2020 at Ashoka University. He was formerly head of the scientific advisory group to the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortia established in December 2020, and the chief executive officer of Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance.

#3147

Philipp E. Scherer

#78221

Overall Influence

#3148

Wann Langston Jr.

#59625

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Wann Langston Jr. was an American paleontologist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Langston worked on a number of different reptiles and amphibians in his long career, beginning with the 1950 description of the theropod dinosaur Acrocanthosaurus. Langston was hired by the National Museum of Canada in 1954 to replace Charles M. Sternberg, and worked in western Canada and on Prince Edward Island until 1962. One of his major finds, with Loris Russell, was the rediscovery of Sternberg's Scabby Butte Pachyrhinosaurus bonebed. Langston, along with a small team of fieldworkers,...

#3149

Pascal Fries

#59760

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Pascal Fries is a German neurophysiologist. Vita Pascal Fries was born in St. Ingbert. He studied medicine from 1991 to 1993 at the University of Saarland and from 1993 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, where he completed his medical studies in 1998 with the state examination. For his doctoral thesis, he worked from 1993 to 1998 in the department of Prof. Wolf Singer at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and received his PhD in 2000 from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. From 1999 to 2001 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr.

#3150

Rebecca Saxe

#32474

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Rebecca Saxe is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and associate Dean of Science at MIT. She is an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a board member of the Center for Open Science. She is known for her research on the neural basis of social cognition. She received her BA from Oxford University where she studied Psychology and Philosophy, and her PhD from MIT in Cognitive Science. She is the granddaughter of Canadian coroner and politician Morton Shulman.

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