The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Biology,
#3151
Peter T. Fox
#50372
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Peter T. Fox is a neuroimaging researcher and neurologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He is a professor in the Department of Radiology with joint appointments in Radiology, Medicine, and Psychiatry. He is the founding director of the Research Imaging Institute.
Go to Profile#3152
William Pollack
#57111
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
William Pollack was a British-born American immunologist who developed the Rho immune globulin vaccine against Rh disease, a leading cause of erythroblastosis fetalis. Pollack co-developed the vaccine, also known by the RhoGAM brand name, which is given to pregnant women to prevent Rh disease, with Dr. Vincent Freda and Dr. John G. Gorman of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Pollack's vaccine, introduced in 1968, virtually eliminated cases of Rh disease in developed countries. Prior to the RhoGAM vaccine, Rh disease was responsible for approximately 10,000 infant deaths in the United Stat...
Go to Profile#3153
Jean-Louis Mandel
#65679
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jean-Louis Mandel, born in Strasbourg on February 12, 1946, is a French medical doctor and geneticist, and heads a research team at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology . He has been in charge of the genetic diagnosis laboratory at the University Hospitals of Strasbourg since 1992, as well as a professor at the Collège de France since 2003.
Go to Profile#3154
Mene Pangalos
#58311
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Sir Menelaos Nicolas Pangalos is a British neuroscientist of Greek descent. Pangalos is Executive Vice President, BioPharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca. He is responsible for the company's research and development of new drugs to treat respiratory, inflammation and autoimmune, renal, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Pangalos is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed articles published in scientific journals and serves on the board of the Francis Crick Institute, Cambridge Judge Business School and Dizal Pharma. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and sits on their Science, Industry & Translation Committee.
Go to Profile#3155
Luis M. Rocha
#28311
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Luis M. Rocha is the George J. Klir Professor of Systems Science at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, Binghamton University . He has been director of the NSF-NRT Complex Networks and Systems graduate Program in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is also director of the Center for Social and Biomedical Complexity, between Binghamton University and Indiana University, Bloomington, a Fulbright Scholar, and Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal. His research is on complex systems and networks, computational and s...
Go to Profile#3156
Howard Alan Bern
#78401
Overall Influence
#3157
Federica Sallusto
#78424
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Federica Sallusto is an Italian-Swiss biologist and immunologist. After high school, she studied Biology at Sapienza - University of Rome where she graduated cum laude. In 1999, Sallusto, alongside David Dombrowicz, was awarded the Pharmacia Allergy Research Foundation Award, which is given annually to researchers under the age of 40 who are working on IgE‐associated disease.
Go to Profile#3158
Julian Davies
#77417
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Julian Edmund Davies is a British-born microbiologist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of British Columbia. Education and personal life Davies was born in Wales in January 1932. He earned a B.Sc. in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956 , both from the University of Nottingham. He then did post-doctoral work, first at Columbia University in New York, working on natural products chemistry under Gilbert Stork, and then at the University of Wisconsin under Eugene van Tamelen.
Go to Profile#3159
Alison Heather
#61216
Overall Influence
Alison Kay Heather is an Australian synthetic and molecular biologist at the University of Otago and founder of Insitugen. Academic career After obtaining her PhD in 1996 from the University of Sydney for a thesis entitled Between feast and famine: adaptation of Escherichia coli to growth on low carbohydrate concentrations, Heather moved to the Sydney Heart Research Institute and University of Technology Sydney, and then to the University of Otago, rising to full professor. Heather is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Insitugen.
Go to Profile#3160
Bruce Maslin
#54529
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Bruce Roger Maslin is an Australian botanist, known for his work on Acacia taxonomy. Born in Bridgetown, Western Australia, he obtained an honours degree in botany from the University of Western Australia in 1967, then took up an appointment as a botanist with the Western Australian Herbarium. The following year he was conscripted to serve in the Vietnam War; he gave three years in National Service, serving in Vietnam in 1969. In 1970 he returned to his position at the Western Australian Herbarium, serving in that institution until 1987. During this time he was Australian Botanical Liaison Officer in 1977 and 1978; editor of Nuytsia from 1981 to 1983; and acting curator in 1986 and 1987.
Go to Profile#3161
Pentti Kanerva
#15681
Overall Influence
Pentti Kanerva is an American neuroscientist who is the originator of the sparse distributed memory model. He is responsible for relating the properties of long-term memory to mathematical properties of high-dimensional spaces and compares artificial neural-net associative memory to conventional computer random-access memory and to the neurons in the brain. This theory has been applied to design and implement the random indexing approach to learning semantic relations from linguistic data.
Go to Profile#3162
Michael W. Deem
#24426
Overall Influence
Michael W. Deem is an American engineer, scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Deem received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1991 and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. His thesis research was in statistical mechanics and disordered materials with David Chandler. He did postdoctoral research at Harvard University in physics with David R. Nelson. Deem joined the faculty at University of California, Los Angeles, in 1996 and rose to the rank of associate professor of chemical engineering. From 2002 to 2020 Deem was the John W.
Go to Profile#3163
Wayne M. Becker
#72870
Overall Influence
Wayne M. Becker is emeritus professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin and, under the name W. M. Becker, the original author, and for the next six editions, senior author of The World of the Cell . Becker first joined the University of Wisconsin in 1958 and obtained his PhD in 1967. He received his B.S, M.S., and Ph.D in biochemistry at this college. Becker spent two years in the United Kingdom as a NATO/NIH postdoctoral researcher, and then returned to the campus in 1969 as a member of the Botany Department Faculty. He also spent a year in the same position at the University of Edinbu...
Go to Profile#3164
Sally Kornbluth
#13501
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Sally Ann Kornbluth is a cell biologist and academic administrator, currently serving as the 18th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since January 2023. Kornbluth previously served as provost of Duke University from 2014 to 2022 and vice dean for basic sciences of Duke University School of Medicine from 2006 to 2014.
Go to Profile#3165
Tilman Schirmer
#58804
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Tilman Schirmer is a structural biologist and Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. Life Tilman Schirmer studied physics at the Universities of Konstanz and Vienna, and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1985 he earned his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried. He subsequently conducted research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In 1989, Tilman Schirmer joined the Biozentrum, University of Basel, initially as a group leader and was appointed as Associate Professor of Structural Biology in 1997. He ...
Go to Profile#3166
Gabriel Horn
#29943
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Sir Gabriel Horn, MD, ScD, FRS, FRCP was a British neuroscientist and Professor in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His research was into the neural mechanisms of learning and memory.
Go to Profile#3167
Philip Kantoff
#54600
Overall Influence
Philip W. Kantoff is a medical oncologist. He is the chairman and chief executive officer of Convergent Therapeutics. He served as the Chairman of Medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center between 2015 and 2021. He is best known for his contributions to the impact of DNA abnormalities in prostate cancer and the discovery of therapies for metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer.
Go to Profile#3168
Toomas Kivisild
#50038
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Toomas Kivisild is an Estonian population geneticist. He graduated as a biologist and received his PhD in Genetics, from University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2000. Since then he has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Medicine, at Stanford University , Estonian Biocentre , as the Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Tartu , and as a Lecturer and Reader in Human Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge . From 2018 he is a professor in the Department of Human Genetics at KU Leuven and a senior researcher...
Go to Profile#3169
Stephen W. Scherer
#49990
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Stephen Wayne "Steve" Scherer is a Canadian scientist who studies genetic variation in human disease. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto under Professor Lap-chee Tsui. Together they founded Canada's first human genome centre, the Centre for Applied Genomics at the Hospital for Sick Children. He continues to serve as director of TCAG, and is also a University Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics, and the director of the McLaughlin Centre at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#3170
Douglas McCauley
#30398
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Douglas J. McCauley is a professor of ocean science at the University of California Santa Barbara, and serves as the Director of the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory - an applied ocean research center based at UC Santa Barbara's Marine Science Institute. His research focuses on using tools from ecology, data science, and marine policy for ocean conservation.
Go to Profile#3171
H. Ichiro Yamamura
#78705
Overall Influence
#3172
Patricia Vickers-Rich
#56773
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Patricia Arlene Vickers-Rich , also known as Patricia Rich, is an Australian Professor of Palaeontology and Palaeobiology, who researches the environmental changes that have impacted Australia and how this shaped the evolution of Australia’s fauna and flora.
Go to Profile#3173
Daniel J. Siegel
#23730
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Daniel J. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute. Background Daniel J. Siegel received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent and adult psychiatry. He served as a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at UCLA, studying family interactions with an emphasis on how attachment experiences influence emotions, behavior, autobiographical memory and narrative.
Go to Profile#3174
Kozi Asada
#78733
Overall Influence
#3175
Anthony A. Grace
#77264
Overall Influence
Anthony A. Grace is an American neuroscientist, currently a Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at University of Pittsburgh, including working in neurophysiology of basal ganglia system related to psychiatric disorders.
Go to Profile#3176
John Steele
#52573
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
John Hyslop Steele was a British oceanographer who made major contributions to the study of marine ecosystems. Work In 1951 Steele began work at the Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, Scotland. He was appointed director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1977. After his retirement from Woods Hole in 1989, Steele continued his interests of research and served on the boards of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, the Exxon Corporation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Go to Profile#3177
Beatrice de Gelder
#51038
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Beatrice M. L. de Gelder is a cognitive neuroscientist and neuropsychologist. She is professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the Tilburg University , and was senior scientist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard Medical School, Boston . She joined the Department of Cognitive Neuroscince at Maastricht University in 2012. Her research interests include behavioral and neural emotion processing from facial and bodily expressions, multisensory perception and interaction between auditory and visual processes, and nonconscious perception in neurological patients.
Go to Profile#3178
David W. Deamer
#62530
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
David Wilson Deamer is an American biologist and Research Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Deamer has made significant contributions to the field of membrane biophysics. His work led to a novel method of DNA sequencing and a more complete understanding of the role of membranes in the origin of life.
Go to Profile#3179
Usha Goswami
#34035
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Usha Claire Goswami is a researcher and professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and the director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Downing Site. She obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Oxford before becoming a professor of cognitive developmental psychology at the University College London. Goswami's work is primarily in educational neuroscience with major focuses on reading development and developmental dyslexia.
Go to Profile#3180
Pierre Magistretti
#75114
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Pierre J. Magistretti is an Italian and Swiss neuroscientist and physician. He is a professor emeritus of neuroscience at EPFL , University of Geneva and University of Lausanne . Until 2012, he was the director of the EPFL's Brain Mind Institute and director of the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience of the University of Lausanne and Lausanne University Hospital. Since 2012 he has been distinguished professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology where he was dean of the division of biological and environmental sciences and engineering between 2012 and 2020.
Go to Profile#3181
Sarah Young
#78710
Overall Influence
Sarah Louise Young is a New Zealand immunology academic, and as of 2014 was head of pathology at the University of Otago. From 2020-2023 she ran the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney. In 2023 Prof Young was appointed as the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
Go to Profile#3182
Martha L. Ludwig
#30531
Overall Influence
1931 - 2006 (75 years)
Martha Ludwig was an American macromolecular crystallographer. She was the J. Lawrence Oncley Distinguished University Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan. Personal life Ludwig was born on August 16, 1931, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her father was Leon Ludwig, a physicist, and her mother was Agnes Sutermeister Ludwig, a worker in the social services. Soon after her birth, her father accepted a job as the director of the Westinghouse facility, resulting in the family move to Buffalo, NY. As a child in school, Ludwig found a passion for mathematical puzzles and hop...
Go to Profile#3183
Charles Krauthammer
#1054
Overall Influence
1950 - 2018 (68 years)
Charles Krauthammer was an American political columnist. A moderate liberal who turned independent conservative as a political pundit, Krauthammer won the Pulitzer Prize for his columns in The Washington Post in 1987. His weekly column was syndicated to more than 400 publications worldwide. While in his first year studying medicine at Harvard Medical School, Krauthammer became permanently paralyzed from the waist down after a diving board accident that severed his spinal cord at cervical spinal nerve 5. After spending 14 months recovering in a hospital, he returned to medical school, graduati...
Go to Profile#3184
John Duncan
#62038
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Duncan is a British neuroscientist. After completing his education at the University of Oxford in 1976, Duncan worked for two years with Michael Posner at the University of Oregon, and then worked at the Medical Research Council . As of 2018, he is Programme Leader at the MRC's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge; he is also a Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#3185
Jerzy Duszyński
#31452
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jerzy Duszyński is a Polish biochemist and professor of biological sciences. Since 2015 he has been President of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a former Director of the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences , a former Polish deputy minister of science , and a former Dean of Division II—Biological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences .
Go to Profile#3186
Kevin Struhl
#78126
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Kevin Struhl is an American molecular biologist and the David Wesley Gaiser Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Struhl is primarily known for his work on transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in yeast using molecular, genetic, biochemical, and genomic approaches. More recently, he has used related approaches to study transcriptional regulatory circuits involved in cellular transformation and the formation of cancer stem cells.
Go to Profile#3187
Boris Worm
#59824
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Boris Worm is a marine ecologist, and the Killam Research Professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Worm is known for his scientific contributions and commitment to spreading public awareness regarding marine conservation. In 2004 he received the German "Heinz Maier Leibnitz"-Award, an award for young researchers from the German Research Foundation .
Go to Profile#3188
Els Goulmy
#59868
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Els Goulmy is an eminent professor of transplantation biology, especially regarding minor histocompatibility antigen, at Leiden University. Goulmy is an expert in the area of tissue typing and belongs internationally to the absolute top of her discipline. She was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2002.
Go to Profile#3189
George C. Clerk
#23616
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
George Carver Clerk, was a Ghanaian botanist and plant pathologist. A professor and later, an emeritus professor at the University of Ghana, Legon, he also focused his research on West African mycology and ecology. Clerk, along with his academic contemporary Ebenezer Laing , was one of Ghana's earliest practitioners of botany as a scientific discipline, in addition to his pioneering role as a plant pathologist in West Africa. In 1973, G. C. Clerk became a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#3190
Bruce Beehler
#52721
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bruce M. Beehler is an ornithologist and research associate of the Bird Division of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Prior to this appointment, Beehler worked for Conservation International, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Counterpart International, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Go to Profile#3191
Maurizio Fava
#78984
Overall Influence
#3192
Roy Goodacre
#41289
Overall Influence
Royston "Roy" Goodacre is Chair in Biological Chemistry at the University of Liverpool. With training in both Microbiology and Pyrolysis-Mass Spectrometry, Goodacre runs a multidisciplinary Metabolomics and Raman spectroscopy research group in the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology , and leads ISMIB's Centre for Metabolomics Research and the Laboratory for Bioanalytical Spectroscopy.
Go to Profile#3193
Mariann Bienz
#67681
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mariann Bienz, Lady Pelham FRS FMedSci is a Swiss-British molecular biologist based at the UK Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. She has been a member of their Senior Scientific Staff since 1991, was Joint-head of Cell Biology in 2007-08 and has been a Group Leader of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry Division since 2008.
Go to Profile#3194
Carlos D. Bustamante
#17022
Overall Influence
Carlos D. Bustamante is an American population geneticist and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Early life and education Bustamante is a native of Venezuela who immigrated to the United States at age seven. He attended Harvard University, from which he graduated with a bachelor's and later a doctorate in biology, along with a M.S. in statistics. After completing his Doctoral studies, Bustamante went on to study at Oxford University, focusing in Mathematical Genetics in 2001. From 2002 to 2009, Bustamante was a faculty member at Cornell University, publishing numerous works...
Go to Profile#3195
Ruth Watkins
#30588
Overall Influence
Ruth V. Watkins is an American scholar of child language and speech pathology. She was the 16th president of the University of Utah. She stepped down from the role on April 7, 2021, to enter the private sector.
Go to Profile#3196
Brian Francis Hoffman
#79017
Overall Influence
#3197
Okihide Hikosaka
#72313
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Okihide Hikosaka is a neuroscience research professor who specializes in the mechanisms of motivation, learning, skill, decision-making, attention, and oculomotor control. His research into neuronal mechanisms of voluntary behavior and basal ganglia function created breakthroughs in the understanding of the neurochemistry behind information-seeking behavior and the efficacy of grouping motor sequence learning actions in order to remember more than individual actions.
Go to Profile#3198
Richard Scolyer
#65868
Overall Influence
Richard Anthony Scolyer is an Australian pathologist. He is a senior staff specialist in tissue pathology and diagnostic oncology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, co-medical director at the Melanoma Institute Australia, and Cojoint professor at the University of Sydney.
Go to Profile#3199
Yosef Yarden
#79049
Overall Influence
#3200
Alexandr Rasnitsyn
#72379
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Alexandr Pavlovich Rasnitsyn is a Russian entomologist, expert in palaeoentomology, and Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation . His scientific interests are centered on the palaeontology, phylogeny, and taxonomy of hymenopteran insects and insects in general. He has also studied broader biological problems such as evolutionary theory, the principles of phylogenetics, taxonomy, nomenclature, and palaeoecology. He has published over 300 articles and books in several languages. In August 2008 he was awarded the Distinguished Research Medal of the International Society of Hymenopterists.
Go to Profile