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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#3251

Ann Kiessling

#35239

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Ann Kiessling is an American reproductive biologist and a researcher in human parthenogenic stem cell research at The Bedford Research Foundation. She was an associate professor in teaching hospitals of Harvard Medical School from 1985 until 2012.

#3252

Marc Parmentier

#52857

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Marc Parmentier is a Belgian scientist, and professor at the Institute of Multi-disciplinary Research in Human and Molecular Biology of the Université Libre de Bruxelles , where he completed his PhD in 1990. His research interest is on G protein-coupled receptors , and of transgenic models of human pathologies. In 1999, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Biological and Medical Sciences.

#3253

Martin Brasier

#42348

Overall Influence

1947 - 2014 (67 years)

Martin David Brasier FGS, FLS was an English palaeobiologist and astrobiologist known for his conceptual analysis of microfossils and evolution in the Precambrian and Cambrian. He was Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall. His research critically examined the context and character of the early fossil record, making use of field mapping, logging, optical petrography, stable isotope geochemistry, confocal microscopy, NanoSims microprobes, and lasers for high resolution 3D scanning and laser Raman spectroscopy.

#3254

Matt Wedel

#54753

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Mathew John Wedel is an American paleontologist. He is associate professor at the Western University of Health Sciences Department of Anatomy in California. Wedel studies sauropods and the evolution of pneumatic bones in dinosaurs. At Western University, Wedel teaches gross anatomy. He has authored papers naming Aquilops , Brontomerus , and Sauroposeidon . He has published research exploring how some dinosaurs achieved large sizes. In 2016, he co-authored the book The Sauropod Dinosaurs.

#3255

Dilip V. Jeste

#79831

Overall Influence

#3256

Sean Munro

#73018

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Sean Munro is a Group Leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology . From 2012 until 2023, he served as Head of the Cell Biology Division.

#3257

Dieter Söll

#50097

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Dieter Gerhard Söll is a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Chemistry at the Yale University. He earned his B.S. and Ph.D. from Stuttgart University in 1962 and did his postdoctoral work at University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1962-1965 with Har Gobind Khorana. He was briefly an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin before joining the Yale faculty in 1967 and has been there since. He was named a Sterling Professor in 2006. As a postdoc with Jack Strominger, he identified tRNAs that were involved in peptidoglycan formation leading to the discovery of novel aminoacyl-tRNA functions.

#3258

John R. Mascola

#71129

Overall Influence

John R. Mascola is an American physician-scientist, immunologist and infectious disease specialist. He was the director of the Vaccine Research Center , part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , National Institutes of Health . He also served as a principal advisor to Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, on vaccines and biomedical research affairs. Mascola is the current Chief Scientific Officer for ModeX Therapeutics.

#3259

Dennis Burton

#79520

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Dennis R. Burton is a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, in the United States. He also works in AIDS vaccine research, and is scientific director of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center there. He sits on the steering committee of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard.

#3260

Eric Westhof

#73490

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Éric Westhof is a French biochemist born in Uccle on July 25, 1948. He is a member of the Academie des sciences, head of Education and Training and a member of the Board of Directors of the "La Main à la pâte" Foundation. He is professor emeritus of structural biochemistry at the University of Strasbourg at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

#3261

Michael A. Brownlee

#79969

Overall Influence

#3262

Cao Tianqin

#42357

Overall Influence

1920 - 1995 (75 years)

Cao Tianqin , also known as Tien-chin Tsao, was a Chinese biochemist and a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry. With a research focus on muscle protein, he discovered the myosin light chain and pioneered the study of tropomyosin and paramyosin using electron microscopes. He was a strong advocate and main leader for the synthesis of insulin, and spearheaded the research of plant viruses in China.

#3263

Olevi Kull

#67989

Overall Influence

1955 - 2007 (52 years)

Olevi Kull was an Estonian professor at the University of Tartu known for his contribution to ecology. Following his death, a memorial fund was established by donations in his memory, which provides travel stipends to students in the fields of plant ecophysiology, forest ecology and ecosystem ecology.

#3264

Govindjee

#26345

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Govindjee is an Indian-American scientist and educator. He is Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Plant Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught from 1961 until 1999. As Professor Emeritus since 1999, Govindjee has continued to be active in the field of photosynthesis through teaching and publishing. He is recognized internationally as a leading expert on photosynthesis.

#3265

Jaakko Jalas

#51549

Overall Influence

1920 - 1999 (79 years)

Arvo Jaakko Juhani Jalas was a Finnish botanist. He worked in the University of Helsinki. Career He began his university studies in 1938, one year before the Russian–Finnish Winter War, where he fought on the front, and again in the Continuation War in 1941 and 1944. In that period, he made botanical expeditions to the disputed territory of Karelia .

#3266

Joël Bockaert

#74489

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Joël Bockaert is a French biologist. Biography He was a student at the École Normale d'Instituteur in Mérignac from 1961 to 1964 and at the École Normale supérieure-Rue d'Ulm-Paris from 1964 to 1968.

#3267

Erika Hagelberg

Erika Hagelberg

#50734

Overall Influence

Erika Hagelberg is a British Evolutionary geneticist and Professor of Biosciences at the University of Oslo. She works on ancient DNA and pioneered a means to extract DNA from bones. Her research has applications in evolutionary biology and forensic science.

#3268

Alexandra Worden

Alexandra Worden

#56696

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Alexandra Z. Worden is a microbial ecologist and genome scientist known for her expertise in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes and their influence on global biogeochemical cycles. Research contributions Worden's research focuses on the physiology and ecology of eukaryotic phytoplankton and their roles in the carbon cycle. She initiated this research through an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology and expanded it thereafter by adapting multiple molecular and omic methods to characterize the evolution and ecological contributions of these photosynthetic plankton, which are now known to be major ocean primary producers.

#3269

Robert Parton

#80115

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Robert G. Parton FAA is a British/Australian cell biologist. He is a Group Leader in the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland and Deputy Director of the University of Queensland Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis.

#3270

John E. Dowling

#51045

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

John E. Dowling is an American neuroscientist and Gordon and Llura Gund Research Professor of Neurosciences at Harvard University. He is best known for his seminal work in vision science, having elucidated the biochemistry of rhodopsin and development of the vertebrate retina, as well as diseases that affect vision such as vitamin A deficiency and retinitis pigmentosa. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, the National Academy of Sciences in 1976, and the American Philosophical Society in 1992.

#3271

Pauld D. Thompson

#80154

Overall Influence

#3272

Ana Pombo

#72760

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Ana Pombo is an appointed Professor of Biology at Humboldt University and senior group leader at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin-Buch with the focus on "Epigenetic Regulation and Chromatin Architecture". Since May 2018, Pombo is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization .

#3273

A. Lee Dellon

#67623

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Arnold Lee Dellon is an American plastic surgeon known for pioneering and developing the modern field of peripheral nerve injury. He is a Professor of Plastic Surgery and Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University and the founder of Dellon Institutes for Peripheral Nerve Surgery.

#3274

Richard Goldsby

#48668

Overall Influence

Richard A. Goldsby is an American immunologist who is professor of biology at Amherst College, Massachusetts. In addition to his specialism, he has written on a variety of topics, including the social and biological significance of HIV/AIDS and of the human racial differences. He is a notable proponent of the view that races are biological, as well as social constructs.

#3275

Ronald Archie Nussbaum

#60496

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Ronald Archie Nussbaum is an American herpetologist. He works with evolutionary biology and ecology of amphibians and reptiles, including systematics of caecilians and salamanders. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.

#3276

Robyn Mary Barker

#79453

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Robyn M. Barker is an Honorary Research Associate of the South Australian Herbarium. She now works part-time, her duties include maintenance of the Vascular Plant Census for the State. Barker's research interests also include systematics and several plant genera. She is a life member of the Australian Systematic Botany Society. Some of the species named and described by Barker include Hakea bicornata, H. horrida, H. oligoneura and H. pendens.

#3277

Eric Rubin

#18056

Overall Influence

Eric J. Rubin is an American microbiologist, infectious disease specialist, and is currently the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. He is also an adjunct professor of immunology and infectious diseases and was formerly the Irene Heinz Given Professor and chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research laboratory works on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, nontuberculous mycobacteria , and the development and application of bacterial genetics tools to study the fundamental biology of these pathogenic organisms.

#3278

Philip Majerus

#35828

Overall Influence

1936 - 2016 (80 years)

Philip Warren Majerus was an American biochemist who confirmed the cardiovascular benefits of aspirin. After graduating from medical school and completing a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Majerus conducted research at the National Heart Institute before becoming a faculty member at the Washington University School of Medicine.

#3279

John Basmajian

#49782

Overall Influence

1921 - 2008 (87 years)

John V. Basmajian, was a Canadian academic and scientist. He was known for his work in rehabilitation science, specifically in the area of electromyography and biofeedback. Born in Istanbul of Armenian parents, he came to Canada in 1923. The family settled in Brantford, Ontario. During World War II, he served in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps with the rank of captain. After the war, he received his M.D. in 1945 from the University of Toronto.

#3280

Krishna Chatterjee

Krishna Chatterjee

#39968

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Vengalil Krishna Kumar Chatterjee is a British endocrinologist. He is a professor of endocrinology in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also the director of the Cambridge Clinical Research Centre, part of the National Institute for Health Research .

#3281

Philip Fearnside

#73084

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Philip Martin Fearnside is an American biologist and scientist, active for many years in Brazil, where he developed the most important part of his career and gained wide national and international notoriety.

#3282

Alexander Gusev

#74649

Overall Influence

Alexander Gusev is a computational biologist and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Research and career Alexander Gusev has developed computational methods that use genetic data to decipher disease mechanisms. For example, he has identified 34 new genes associated with increased risk of earliest-stage ovarian cancer. He has developed computational methods that integrate molecular data to facilitate functional interpretation of findings from genome-wide association studies. He has contributed to the development of the transcriptome-wide association study approach to mapping disease-associated genes.

#3283

David A. Lewis

#66196

Overall Influence

David A. Lewis is an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist, currently a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Thomas Detre Professor of Academic Psychiatry and also Director of Conte Center for Translational Mental Health Research at University of Pittsburgh.

#3284

Diana Bautista

#55433

Overall Influence

Diana M. Bautista is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the molecular mechanisms underlying itch, touch and pain. She is a full professor of cell and developmental biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and is affiliated with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

#3285

Volker Haucke

#73737

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Volker Haucke is a biochemist and cell biologist. He is Director of the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie Berlin Berlin and Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute for Pharmacy of the Free University of Berlin.

#3286

Hans Ussing

#76982

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

Hans Henriksen Ussing was a Danish scientist, best known for having invented the Ussing chamber. In the early 1950s Ussing was the first to describe the mechanism by which ions are actively transported across frog skin.

#3287

Stephen I. Katz

#39389

Overall Influence

1941 - 2018 (77 years)

Stephen Ira Katz was an American immunodermatologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases from 1995 to 2018. He was the Marion B. Sulzberger Professor of Dermatology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences from 1989 to 1995.

#3288

Takasi Tokioka

#71021

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Takasi Tokioka was a Japanese zoologist. He published over 200 scientific articles on marine animals such as chaetognaths, ctenophores, and tunicates. He was Professor of Zoology at Kyoto University working at the Seto Marine Biological Laboratory in Shirahama, Japan. From 1975 to 1977, he was the Director of SMBL.

#3289

Duane J. Gubler

#80412

Overall Influence

#3290

Daniel R. Brooks

#80432

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Daniel R. Brooks is a professor emeritus of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He specializes in biodiversity, systematics, and conservation biology. In 2004, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

#3291

Philip Stieg

#34468

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Philip E. Stieg is an American academic physician and neurosurgeon. He has been the Neurosurgeon-in-Chief of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center since 2000. Early life Stieg was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

#3292

Peter Breggin

#5381

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Peter Roger Breggin is an American psychiatrist and critic of shock treatment and psychiatric medication and COVID-19 response. In his books, he advocates replacing psychiatry's use of drugs and electroconvulsive therapy with psychotherapy, education, empathy, love, and broader human services.

#3293

Dronamraju Krishna Rao

#52361

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Dronamraju Krishna Rao was an Indian-born geneticist and president of the Foundation for Genetic Research in Houston, Texas. He was born in Pithapuram, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. One focus of his work has been the research of his mentor J. B. S. Haldane. As an author, his name is usually rendered Krishna R. Dronamraju. He died in Houston at age 83.

#3294

Mark H. Johnson

#57560

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Mark Henry Johnson is a British cognitive neuroscientist who, since October 2017, has been Professor of Experimental Psychology and Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

#3295

Ian Gust

#48889

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Ian David Gust AO, FRCPA, FRACP, MASM, FT is an Australian medical researcher, virologist, and former science administrator. Gust's area of work is in the development of drugs and vaccines against viral diseases and he is best known for the development of vaccines against the Hepatitis A virus. He currently serves as a non–executive company director and consultant.

#3296

Michael Purugganan

#56738

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Michael D. Purugganan is a Filipino-American biologist and former journalist. He is the Silver Professor of Biology and the former Dean of Science of New York University . Purugganan is also an affiliated faculty member of NYU Abu Dhabi and the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World , and since 2022, has been the director of 19 Washington Square North, the academic space of NYUAD in New York City. He was the former director of the NYU Center for Genomics and Systems Biology in New York and Abu Dhabi .

#3297

Ruth W. Nduati

#33085

Overall Influence

Karithi Ruth Wanjiru Nduati is a Kenyan Pediatrician and Epidemiologist who also teaches at the University of Nairobi College of Health Sciences. She is also currently leading an interdisciplinary program through the University of Nairobi School of Medicine to educate physician-researchers to best implement HIV treatment and prevention methods backed by research. The program was funded by the Fogarty Training Grant which is a part of the PEPFAR funds the country of Kenya received.

#3298

Christian Keysers

Christian Keysers

#29846

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Christian Keysers is a French and German neuroscientist. Education and career He finished his school education at the European School, Munich and studied psychology and biology at the University of Konstanz, the Ruhr University Bochum, University of Massachusetts Boston, the Shepens eye research Institute of the Harvard Medical School as well as with Marvin Minsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then started his research career at the University of St Andrews by investigating cells in the temporal cortex with David Perrett, and described cells that respond when the monkey views particular faces in a way that correlates with conscious perception.

#3299

John Morton

#65698

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

John Edward Morton was a biologist, scholar, theologian, and conservationist from New Zealand. Trained at Auckland University College and the University of London, he became the author of numerous books, papers, and newspaper columns. Morton researched New Zealand's ecology and marine life, and was a marine zoologist. He was also the presenter of the imported nature and science television programme, Our World.

#3300

Olufunmilayo Olopade

Olufunmilayo Olopade

#16966

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Olufunmilayo I. Olopade born in the year 1957, is a Nigerian hematology oncologist, Associate Dean for Global Health and Walter L. Palmer, Distinguished Service Professor in Medicine and Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. She also serves as director of the University of Chicago Hospital's Cancer Risk Clinic.

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