The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#3201
Les Bursill
#55571
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Leslie William Bursill was a Dharawal historian, archaeologist, anthropologist, and publisher, born in Hurstville, New South Wales, in February 1945. His father, Wallace Richard Bursill, was serving in the 7th Division of the Australian Imperial Force in New Guinea at the time of Bursill's birth. Although Bursill is strongly identified with the Dharawal of southern Sydney , his maternal Dharawal forebears hailed from the area between Kangaroo Valley and the coast near Nowra. Bursill was made a Justice of the Peace at Sutherland Court House in 1976. In 1995, he was appointed Lecturer in Mental Health and Counselling at the University of Sydney.
Go to Profile#3202
John Croxall
#74103
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Patrick Croxall is a British biologist, and was Head of Conservation Biology at the British Antarctic Survey. He is Chair of Global Seabird Programme, of BirdLife International. Life Croxall completed a PhD at the University of Auckland in 1971, on ascidian ecology, supervised by John Morton. He was senior research associate in zoology, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 1972 to 1975. He won a Scientific Medal in 1984, from the Zoological Society of London. He received a President’s Medal from the British Ecological Society.
Go to Profile#3203
Alain Townsend
#71020
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alain Townsend is a Professor of Medicine in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University. His laboratory studies virology, mainly influenza, but more recently ebola. After graduating from St Mary's Hospital, London, he went to the National Institute for Medical Research to study immunology. He received his PhD in 1984, supervised by Brigitte Askonas.
Go to Profile#3204
Daisy Yen Wu
#50194
Overall Influence
1902 - 1993 (91 years)
Daisy Yen Wu was the first Chinese woman engaged as an academic researcher in biochemistry and nutrition. Born into a wealthy industrial family in Shanghai, from a young age she was tutored in English and encouraged to study. She graduated from Nanjing Jinling Women's University in 1921 and then studied in the United States, graduating with a master's degree in biochemistry from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1923. Returning to China, she became an assistant professor at Peking Union Medical College between 1923 and her marriage at the end of 1924 to Hsien Wu. Collaborating with him, she conducted research on proteins and studied nutrition.
Go to Profile#3205
Leonid Kruglyak
#72381
Overall Influence
Leonid Kruglyak is a scientist focusing on evolutionary genetics. He is the Chair of the Department of Human Genetics, a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Human Genetics and Biological Chemistry and was appointed in 2020 The Diller-von Furstenberg Endowed Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#3206
John Lander Harper
#79134
Overall Influence
#3207
Gastón Guzmán
#14964
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Gastón Guzmán Huerta , a Mexican mycologist and anthropologist, was an authority on the genus Psilocybe. Career He was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, in 1932. His interest in mycology began in 1955 when as a graduate student he decided to update his school's poorly kept collection of fungi. During his early field work he found a large assortment of species about which little was known at the time. This inspired him to choose fungi as the topic of his professional thesis.
Go to Profile#3208
Ivan Izquierdo
#25305
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
Ivan Antonio Izquierdo was an Argentine Brazilian scientist and a pioneer in the study of the neurobiology of learning and memory. Born in 1937 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Izquierdo graduated in Medicine and completed his Ph.D. in Pharmacology , both in the University of Buenos Aires . For nearly a decade, Izquierdo taught at National University of Cordoba , in Argentina, but, due to a number of reasons, both political and personal , he moved to Brazil in the beginning of the 1970s, and lived in Porto Alegre since 1978. For more than 20 years, he worked in the "Center of Memory" of the Bioc...
Go to Profile#3209
João Lobo Antunes
#32095
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
João Lobo Antunes was a Portuguese neurosurgeon. Life and career João Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon as the second of six sons of João Alfredo de Figueiredo Lobo Antunes , prominent Neurologist and Professor, close collaborator of Egas Moniz, Nobel prize of physiology, and wife Margarida da Beira Cardoso de Melo Machado, daughter of Joaquim José Machado, 70th, 82nd and 91st Governor of Mozambique and 110th Governor of Portuguese India, and wife Mariana Cardoso de Melo. His great-grandfather in male line was an illegitimate son of Bernardo António de Brito Antunes, 1st Viscount of Nazaré. He ...
Go to Profile#3210
Tara Keck
#57127
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Tara Keck is an American-British neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, at University College London working in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology. She is the Vice-Dean International for the Faculty of Life Sciences. She studies experience-dependent synaptic plasticity, its effect on behaviour and how it changes during ageing and age-related diseases. She has worked in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund on approaches for healthy ageing. Her recent work has focused on loneliness in older people, with a focus on gender.
Go to Profile#3211
Hossein Baharvand
#28062
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Hossein Baharvand is an Iranian stem cell and developmental biologist. He received his B.Sc. in biology from Shiraz University in 1994, and M.Sc. in Developmental Biology from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran in 1996. He then obtained his Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from Khwarizmi University in 2004. He first joined the Royan Institute in 1995 in which he founded Royan Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Technology.
Go to Profile#3212
David Relman
#30781
Overall Influence
David Arnold Relman is an American microbiologist and the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in Medicine, and in Microbiology & Immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His research focuses on the human microbiome and microbial ecosystem—for which he was a pioneer in the use of modern molecular methods, as well as on pathogen discovery and the genomics of host response.
Go to Profile#3213
Michael F. Jacobson
#14021
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michael F. Jacobson , who holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an American scientist and nutrition advocate. Jacobson co-founded the Center for Science in the Public Interest in 1971, along with two fellow scientists he met while working at the Center for the Study of Responsive Law in Washington, DC. When his colleagues left CSPI in 1977, Jacobson became its executive director. In 2017 he was replaced as the executive director by Peter Lurie and held the position of Senior Scientist; he remained on the board of directors of the organization until 2022.
Go to Profile#3214
Wim Crusio
#33792
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Wim E. Crusio is a Dutch behavioral neurogeneticist and a directeur de recherche with the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Talence, France. Education and career Crusio received his bachelor's degree in biology from Radboud University Nijmegen in 1975, where he went on to obtain a master's degree and then a PhD in 1979 and 1984, respectively. His Anubias revision, which was originally published in 1979, was translated in German and continues to engender interest. For his PhD thesis, Crusio studied the inheritance of the effects of anosmia on exploratory behavior of mice, and ...
Go to Profile#3215
Leo Poon
#44905
Overall Influence
Leo Poon is the Head of the Division of Public Health Laboratory Science of the University of Hong Kong. In July 2020, Professor Malik Peiris stepped down from the position of co-director of the joint research pole between Hong Kong University and the Pasteur Institute , and Professor Leo Poon succeeded to this crucial WHO recognized Centre. He is one of the worlds' leading scientists investigating the emergence of viral diseases transferring from animals to humans, such as new strains of Influenza viruses and coronaviruses. Along with colleagues in his Division, he has made major contribu...
Go to Profile#3216
Ulrike Schmidt
#60630
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ulrike Schmidt is a British psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London in London, where she is Professor of Eating Disorders as well as the Head of the Section of Eating Disorders. Schmidt is a consultant at the Eating Disorders Service within the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Schmidt is known for her ground breaking work helping people with eating disorders and their clinicians.
Go to Profile#3217
Kenneth Lacovara
#42688
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Kenneth John Lacovara is an American paleontologist and geologist at Rowan University and fellow of the Explorers Club, known for the discovery of the titanosaurian dinosaur Dreadnoughtus and his involvement in the discovery and naming of the giant sauropod dinosaur Paralititan, as well as his work applying 3D printing technology to paleontology. Lacovara is the founder of the Edelman Fossil Park of Rowan University and the author of the general-audience book, Why Dinosaurs Matter , for which he received a Nautilus Book Award. Additionally, he serves as Paleontology Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#3218
Laurie Glimcher
#24884
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Laurie Hollis Glimcher is an American physician-scientist who was appointed president and CEO of Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in October 2016. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#3219
Urmas Tartes
#59368
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Urmas Tartes is an Estonian biologist and nature photographer. Life and work Tartes ended his studies in Nõo Secondary school in 1982 with a gold medal and graduated from University of Tartu in 1989 with cum laude as biologist-zoologist. He became Doctor of Philosophy in 1995 with a thesis "Respiration Rhythms in Insects".
Go to Profile#3220
Villy Christensen
#37540
Overall Influence
Villy Christensen is an ecosystem modeller with a background in fisheries science. He is known for his work as a project leader and core developer of Ecopath, an ecosystem modelling software system widely used in fisheries management. Ecopath was initially an initiative of the NOAA, but since primarily developed at the UBC Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia. In 2007, it was named as one of the ten biggest scientific breakthroughs in NOAA's 200-year history. The citation states that Ecopath "revolutionized scientists' ability worldwide to understand complex marine ecosystems...
Go to Profile#3221
Eugene Wimberly Myers
#79331
Overall Influence
#3222
Paul John Kramer
#79339
Overall Influence
#3223
Stephen P. Long
#56095
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stephen Patrick Long is a British-born American environmental plant physiologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences studying how to improve photosynthesis to increase the yield of food and biofuel crops. He is the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois and Distinguished Professor in Crop Sciences at Lancaster University. His work, published in Science, proved that photosynthesis can be manipulated to increase plant productivity—an idea once considered the holy grail of plant biology. Long has added to our understandin...
Go to Profile#3224
Gabriel Núñez
#79175
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gabriel Núñez, is a Spanish molecular biologist and immunologist who is known for leading one of the first groups that identified NOD1 and NOD2, two important intracellular pattern recognition receptors. He is currently the Paul de Kruif Endowed Professor at the department of pathology at Michigan Medicine. In 2019, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for his many contributions to the basic sciences in the field of medicine.
Go to Profile#3225
Clive A. Stace
#68738
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Clive Anthony Stace is a British botanist and botanical author. He studied at King's College London, graduated from University of London in 1959 and then studied at the Natural History Museum, London. He was awarded a PhD in 1963. His academic career was based at the University of Leicester, where he held the post of Professor of Plant taxonomy. He is a past president of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland from 1987 to 1989.
Go to Profile#3226
Katherine Richardson Christensen
#42255
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Katherine Richardson Christensen is Professor in Biological Oceanography, leader of the Sustainability Science Centre and a principal investigator for the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen. She was the vice dean of the Faculty of Science from 2007–2012. Her research focuses on the importance of biological processes in the ocean for the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and how ocean biology, including diversity, contributes to ocean function in the Earth System.
Go to Profile#3227
Altangerel Perle
#29838
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Altangerel Perle is a Mongolian palaeontologist. He is employed at the National University of Mongolia. He has described species such as Goyocephale lattimorei, Achillobator giganticus and Erlikosaurus andrewsi. He has been honored by Polish palaeontologist Halszka Osmólska, who named the species Hulsanpes perlei after him.
Go to Profile#3228
Daniel Herschlag
#60027
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Daniel Herschlag is an American biochemist and Professor of Biochemistry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His research uses an interdisciplinary approach to advance our understanding of the fundamental behavior of RNA and proteins. He is well known for his application of rigorous kinetic and mechanistic approaches to RNA and protein systems.
Go to Profile#3229
Ted Murray Dawson
#79502
Overall Influence
#3230
Andrew Townsend Peterson
#79511
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
#3231
Adil Shamoo
#49059
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Adil E. Shamoo is an Iraqi biochemist with an interest in biomedical ethics and foreign policy. He is currently a professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#3232
Dana Carroll
#50043
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Dana Carroll is an American molecular biologist and biochemist at the University of Utah School of Medicine who has made important contributions to the field of genome editing. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2017.
Go to Profile#3233
Marilyn Renfree
#69788
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Marilyn Bernice Renfree is an Australian zoologist. She completed her PhD at the Australian National University, was a post-doctoral fellow in Tennessee and then Edinburgh before returning to Australia. Since 1991, Renfree has been Professor of Zoology at the University of Melbourne. Her main research interest focuses on reproductive and developmental biology of marsupials.
Go to Profile#3234
Fátima Ferreira
#63237
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Fátima Ferreira-Briza is a Brazilian-Austrian biologist, biochemist and educator. Since 2010, she has been Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Salzburg, Austria, where, since October 2011, she has also been Vice-Rector for Research with responsibility for the Faculty of Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#3235
Ola Didrik Saugstad
#34359
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ola Didrik Saugstad is a Norwegian pediatrician, neonatologist and neuroscientist noted for his research on resuscitation of newborn children and his contribution to reduce child mortality. He is a Research Professor at Oslo University Hospital and Professor of Neonatology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. He is Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at the University of Oslo and was Director of the Department of Pediatric Research at Oslo University Hospital from 1991 to 2017.
Go to Profile#3236
Joseph Buxbaum
#43975
Overall Influence
Joseph D. Buxbaum is an American molecular and cellular neuroscientist, autism researcher, and the Director of the Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Buxbaum is also, along with Simon Baron-Cohen, the co-editor of the BioMed Central journal Molecular Autism, and is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Autism Science Foundation. Buxbaum is a Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Genetics and Genomic Sciences. He is also the Vice Chair for Research and for Mentoring in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Go to Profile#3237
Suresh Subramani
#58518
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Dr. Suresh Subramani is the Global Director of the Tata Institute for Genetics & Society, former Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs , and a Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California, San Diego. A highly distinguished cell and molecular biologist, Dr. Subramani has been a member of the UC San Diego faculty since 1982.
Go to Profile#3238
Susan J. Crockford
#64477
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Susan Janet Crockford is a Canadian contract scientist who runs a small business identifying bones and other items in scat of wildlife. She is a blogger who writes about zoology and climate science, specializing in Holocene mammals. From 2004 to 2019 she was an adjunct professor in Anthropology at the University of Victoria. She is known for her blog posts on polar bear biology, which are unsupported by the scientific literature and oppose the scientific consensus that polar bears are threatened by ongoing climate change.
Go to Profile#3239
John Alcock
#31981
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
John Alcock is an American behavioral ecologist and author. He is currently the Emeritus' Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. His research interests include the evolution of diversity in insect populations, studying the adaptive value of different ways in which males find mating partners. He has authored several books, including The Kookaburras' Song: Exploring Animal Behavior in Australia , Sonoran Desert Summer , The Triumph of Sociobiology , and Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach . He authored Sonoran Desert Spring which was illustrated by Marilyn ...
Go to Profile#3240
Peter Ax
#75184
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Peter Ax was a German zoologist. His main work concerned the investigation of interstitial fauna and the exposition of a phylogenetic system for the animals. Biography Peter Ax attended the Oberschule für Jungen in Hamburg until 1944 and subsequently completed his military service. He studied biology at the University of Kiel from 1946, and graduated with a doctorate in 1950. From 1952 to 1961, he was employed as a scientific worker at the same university. He gained his habilitation in 1955, and worked as a Dozent. In 1961, he went to the University of Göttingen, where he held the chair in Morphology and Systematic Zoology.
Go to Profile#3241
John Alexander Moore
#43748
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
John Alexander Moore was an American zoology professor. Early life and education Moore was born to Louise Hammond Blume and George Douglas Moore, a lawyer, in Charles Town, West Virginia in 1915. Four years later his parents divorced and Moore traveled with his mother first to Carson City, Nevada, and Oakland, California, until she remarried and moved the family to Markham, Virginia, two years after her divorce. Although the schools he attended at the time were not the best, Moore's location in the Blue Ridge Mountains kindled his interest in birds from a young age; Moore published his first academic article in The Auk at age 15.
Go to Profile#3242
Sudha Bhattacharya
#54700
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sudha Bhattacharya is an Indian academic, scientist and a writer. She is recognized primarily for her in-depth study of Entamoeba histolytica, a parasitic protozoan that causes amoebiasis: Dr. Bhattacharya's laboratory first detected Ribosomal RNA genes on Circular DNA, while studying the parasite, and also discovered families of retrotransposons in the parasite genome. Her work has primarily been in the fields of Molecular Parasitology and Gene Regulation.
Go to Profile#3243
Charles Tator
#53616
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Charles H. Tator is a Canadian physician. Born in Toronto, he studied medicine at the University of Toronto. He interned at the Toronto General Hospital and returned to graduate studies in the neuropathology division at the University of Toronto, completing an MA and PhD and continuing his training in neurosurgery. In 1969, Tator became a fellow in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in Neurosurgery. In the same year, he became an assistant professor at the university and he became a Professor in 1980. He was head of the neurosurgery division at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and served as director of the Toronto Hospital Neurosciences Centre from 1983 to 1988.
Go to Profile#3244
Peter Heinrich Krammer
#79693
Overall Influence
#3245
Christian R. H. Raetz
#65301
Overall Influence
1946 - 2011 (65 years)
Christian Rudolf Hubert Raetz was the George Barth Geller Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. His laboratory's research focused on lipid biochemistry and has contributed significantly to the understanding of Lipid A biosynthesis.
Go to Profile#3246
Pieter Cullis
#74781
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Pieter Rutter Cullis is a Canadian physicist and biochemist known for his contributions to the field of lipid nanoparticles . Lipid nanoparticles are essential to current mRNA vaccines as a delivery system. Prof. Cullis is best known for the development of ionizable cationic lipids. These lipids are able to complex with negatively charged nucleic acids at low pH where they are positively charged because they have a pKa if approximately 6.4. They reduce or eliminate toxicity associated with cationic lipids at physiological pH of 7.4 because they adopt a net neutral charge. Finally, they enabl...
Go to Profile#3247
Wolf Dittus
#55548
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Wolfgang Peter Johann Dittus is a primatologist and behavioral ecologist based in Sri Lanka. Early life Born in Berlin, Germany, and brought up in the rural Black Forest region Baden-Württemberg, Wolfgang 'Wolf' Dittus migrated to Canada in 1953, where he studied geology at McGill University. During this time, however, his interests shifted to psychology and zoology, his early research having been on the song patterns of cardinal birds, inspiring an interest in animal communication in general.
Go to Profile#3248
Rebeccah Slater
#70727
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Rebeccah Slater is a British neuroscientist and academic. She is professor of paediatric neuroscience and a senior Wellcome Trust research fellow at the University of Oxford. She is also a professorial fellow in Neuroscience at St John's College.
Go to Profile#3249
Wolfram Schultz
#79755
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
#3250
Matthew Bonnan
#64926
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Matthew Bonnan is an American paleobiologist, a Professor of Biological Sciences at Stockton University, and as of 2021 a singer/songwriter. His research combines traditional descriptive and anatomical study with computer-aided morphometric analysis and modeling of vertebrate skeletons, and he is the co-discoverer of three new species of dinosaurs. He is the author of the book The Bare Bones: An Unconventional Evolutionary History of the Skeleton, designed to introduce undergraduates and curious lay readers to the anatomy and evolution of the vertebrate skeleton. Bonnan has a music/art outreac...
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