The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#3451
John Kopchick
#53174
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Kopchick is a molecular biologist and co-inventor of the drug Somavert , which has improved the lives of acromegalic individuals around the world. He is currently the Goll-Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of Molecular Biology in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. Dr. Kopchick's groundbreaking work in the field of growth hormone has helped shape the study of endocrinology.
Go to Profile#3452
John Aggleton
#77524
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
John Aggleton FRS FMedSci FLSW is a British behavioural neuroscientist. Education and career Aggleton obtained his B.A. in natural sciences in 1976 at Cambridge University and his Ph.D. with his thesis entitled Anatomical and Functional Subdivisions of the Amygdala in 1980 from the University of Oxford. From 1983 he was first lecturer and then from 1992 senior lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of Durham. Since 1994, he has been professor of cognitive neuroscience at Cardiff University, where he studies the architecture of the brain and how various brain structures wor...
Go to Profile#3453
Chetan Eknath Chitnis
#58762
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Chetan Eknath Chitnis is an Indian scientist in the field of malaria research. He is the head of the Malaria Parasite Biology and Vaccines Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences as well as Indian National Science Academy . He received the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Award in 2004 and the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences 2010. Chitnis is the former principal investigator of the malaria research group at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in New Delhi.
Go to Profile#3454
Caroline Robert
#82719
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#3455
Andrew F. Read
#73703
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Andrew Fraser Read FRS is Evan Pugh professor of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State University and the Director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. Education Read was educated at the University of Otago where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1984. He moved on to the University of Oxford where he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1989 for research supervised by Paul H. Harvey.
Go to Profile#3456
Neil J. Risch
#82768
Overall Influence
#3457
Christos Pantelis
#33688
Overall Influence
Professor Christos Pantelis is an Australian professor of medicine who is the Director of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre. Profile Prof. Christos Pantelis is an Australian of Greek background. He completed his medical degree at the University of Melbourne and trained at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne. Two years later, in 1979, he commenced his training in psychiatry at the Royal Free Hospital in London, England. During his training, he spent 18 months as a Research Registrar at University College Hospital to undertake an epidemiological study of schizophrenia in Inner London. He was appointed as a lecturer at Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School in 1988.
Go to Profile#3458
David Dolphin
#21727
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
David H. Dolphin, is a Canadian biochemist. He is an internationally recognized expert in porphyrin chemistry and biochemistry. He was the lead creator of Visudyne, a medication used in conjunction with laser treatment to eliminate the abnormal blood vessels in the eye associated with conditions such as the wet form of macular degeneration.
Go to Profile#3459
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
#44293
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg , is a biologist and climate scientist specialising in coral reefs, in particular bleaching due to global warming and climate change. He has published over 500 journal articles and been cited over 50,000 times.
Go to Profile#3460
Anne Spang
#73234
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Anne Spang is a German Biochemist/Cell Biologist and Professor at the Biozentrum University of Basel, Switzerland. Life Anne Spang studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt and Biochemistry at the University of Paris VI, France. She received her PhD in 1996 at the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried. She was then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. From 1999 to 2006 she was an Independent Research Group Leader at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tübingen. Since 2005 Anne Spang...
Go to Profile#3461
Sjors Scheres
#66907
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Sjors Hendrik Willem Scheres FRS is a Dutch scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge, UK. Education Scheres studied Chemistry at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, and spent nine months at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France for his undergraduate research thesis. He then came back to Utrecht University for his DPhil in Protein Crystallography, which was supervised by Piet Gros.
Go to Profile#3462
Brian Knutson
#52067
Overall Influence
Brian Knutson is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University and director of the Symbiotic Project on Affective Neuroscience. His research focuses on the neural basis of emotion, and has been covered in multiple news sources.
Go to Profile#3463
Zelig Eshhar
#54182
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Zelig Eshhar is an Israeli immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. He was Chairman of the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute twice, in the 1990s and 2000s.
Go to Profile#3464
Nicholas C. Ling
#82834
Overall Influence
#3465
Pappachan Ettoop Kolattukudy
#82846
Overall Influence
#3466
Jaime Imitola
#31183
Overall Influence
Jaime Imitola is an American neuroscientist, neurologist and immunologist. Imitola's clinical and research program focuses on Progressive Multiple Sclerosis and the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration and repair in humans. His research includes the translational neuroscience of neural stem cells into patients. Imitola is known for his discoveries on the intrinsic immunology of neural stem cells, the impact of inflammation in the endogenous neural stem cell in multiple sclerosis, and the ethical implications of stem cell tourism in neurological diseases.
Go to Profile#3467
Klaus-Peter Lesch
#78942
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Klaus-Peter Lesch is a German clinical psychiatrist who has been investigating the neurobiological foundation of personality traits. His 1996 paper on the association between the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene and the personality trait neuroticism has been highly cited and was one of the first papers in personality genetics.
Go to Profile#3468
Doris Tsao
#45221
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Doris Ying Tsao is an American systems neuroscientist and professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. She is recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI with single-unit electrophysiological recordings and for discovering the macaque face patch system for face perception. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the director of the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience. She won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018. Tsao was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in ...
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Robert Root-Bernstein
#23915
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robert Root-Bernstein is a professor of physiology at Michigan State University. In 1981, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a "genius grant." He has also researched and consulted on creativity for more than fifteen years. Among other books, he has authored Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People, Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge, and Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus. In Rethinking AIDS, Root-Bernstein postulated that factors in addition to HIV may contribute to AIDS.
Go to Profile#3470
Mark Lathrop
#79259
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mark Lathrop is a Canadian Biostatistician. He headed the Center for the Study of Human Polymorphisms, but returned to Canada as Scientific Director at McGill University and Genome Quebec's Innovation Centre in 2011.
Go to Profile#3471
Mark McMenamin
#20525
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mark A. S. McMenamin is an American paleontologist and professor of geology at Mount Holyoke College. He has contributed to the study of the Cambrian explosion and the Ediacaran biota. He is the author of several books, most recently Deep Time Analysis and Dynamic Paleontology . His earlier works include The Garden of Ediacara: Discovering the Earliest Complex Life , one of the only popular accounts of research on the Ediacaran biota, and Science 101: Geology . He is credited with co-naming several geological formations in Mexico, describing several new fossil genera and species, and naming the Precambrian supercontinent Rodinia.
Go to Profile#3472
Dieter Oesterhelt
#82930
Overall Influence
#3473
Thomas M. Jessell
#82936
Overall Influence
#3474
Alan L. Schiller
#38799
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alan L. Schiller, M.D. is an American clinical pathologist and an expert in the effects of space and weightlessness on bone structure. Schiller has served on the Space Science Board of the Committee on Space Biology and Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and as a member of the Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications Advisory Committee of NASA. He currently serves on the board of directors of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.
Go to Profile#3475
Eric Conn
#64679
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Eric Edward Conn was an American biochemist. His research focused on plant metabolism, specifically the intermediary metabolism of secondary plant products. Early life and education Eric Edward Conn was born on January 6, 1923, in Berthoud, Colorado. He lived with his family in Belaire, Kansas during the Great Depression and the Dust-Bowl. They moved to Fort Morgan after losing their assets. There, Conn attended high school, and earned a four-year scholarship to the University of Colorado at Boulder, becoming a first generation college student.
Go to Profile#3476
Donald Lowell Price
#82961
Overall Influence
#3477
Frans Stafleu
#66962
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Frans Antonie Stafleu was a Dutch systematic botanist, former Chair of the Institute of Systematic Botany at the University of Utrecht, and author of Taxonomic Literature: A Selective Guide to Botanical Publications and Collections, with Dates, Commentaries, and Types along with 644 other publications. He occupied several positions in the International Association for Plant Taxonomy. The latter organization now triennially awards the Stafleu Medal "for an excellent publication dealing with historical, bibliographic and/or nomenclatural aspects of plant systematics".
Go to Profile#3478
Edgar Haber
#82974
Overall Influence
#3479
Demetrios P. Papahadjopoulos
#82977
Overall Influence
#3480
Norman Sartorius
#18229
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Norman Sartorius is a German-Croatian psychiatrist and university professor. Sartorius is a former director of the World Health Organization's Division of Mental Health, and a former president of the World Psychiatric Association and of the European Psychiatric Association. He has been described as "one of the most prominent and influential psychiatrists of his generation" and as "living legend"
Go to Profile#3481
Judith G. Voet
#54071
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Judith Greenwald Voet is a James Hammons Professor, Emerita in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Swarthmore College. Her research interests include enzyme reaction mechanisms and enzyme inhibition. She and her husband, Donald Voet, are authors of biochemistry textbooks that are widely used in undergraduate and graduate curricula.
Go to Profile#3482
John J. Tyson
#32622
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
John J. Tyson is an American systems biologist and mathematical biologist who serves as University Distinguished Professor of Biology at Virginia Tech, and is the former president of the Society for Mathematical Biology. He is known for his research on biochemical switches in the cell cycle, dynamics of biological networks and on excitable media.
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Frederick C. Neidhardt
#80197
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Frederick C. Neidhardt was an American microbiologist who was on the faculty at Purdue University and the University of Michigan. He is known for his work on the physiology and biochemistry of bacterial growth and for early work in bacterial proteomics.
Go to Profile#3484
Helen F. James
#58443
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Helen Frances James is an American paleontologist and paleornithologist who has published extensively on the fossil birds of the Hawaiian Islands. She is the curator in charge of birds in the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#3485
Michael Akam
#79130
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michael Edwin Akam FRS is a British zoologist. He is professorial fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge, and he is a director, University Museum of Zoology. He was Damon Runyan fellow at Stanford University, from 1979 to 1981. He is American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow.
Go to Profile#3486
Elizabeth F. Neufeld
#40960
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Elizabeth Fondal Neufeld is a French-American geneticist whose research has focused on the genetic basis of metabolic disease in humans. Life Neufeld and her Russian Jewish family emigrated to the United States from Paris in 1940; they had left Europe as refugees to escape Nazi persecution. The family settled in New York, where she attended Hunter College High School before graduating from Queens College in 1948 with a Bachelor of Science. She went on to work as a research assistant at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, looking at blood disorders in mice. Later on, she attended graduate school at University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#3487
Jeffery D. Molkentin
#42848
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jeffery Daniel Molkentin is an American molecular biologist. He is the director of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology for Cincinnati Children's hospital where he is also co-director of their Heart Institute. Molkentin holds a professorship at the University of Cincinnati's Department of Pediatrics.
Go to Profile#3488
Tikhon Rabotnov
#77098
Overall Influence
1904 - 2000 (96 years)
Tikhon Alexandrovich Rabotnov was a Russian plant ecologist. He was professor and head of the Department of Geobotany at Moscow State University until 1981. He was a father figure to generations of Russian plant ecologists. He conducted ground breaking studies in the regeneration of natural plant communities – studies which remained largely overlooked in the West.
Go to Profile#3489
Jaime Powell
#57474
Overall Influence
1953 - 2016 (63 years)
Jaime Eduardo Powell was an Argentine paleontologist who described the titanosaur sauropod dinosaur taxa Aeolosaurus and found evidence that titanosaurs have osteoderms. Research Powell described the first convincing fossil evidence that titanosaurs had osteoderms.
Go to Profile#3490
B. Brett Finlay
#83120
Overall Influence
#3491
Luis M. Chiappe
#54116
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Luis María Chiappe is an Argentine paleontologist born in Buenos Aires who is best known for his discovery of the first sauropod nesting sites in the badlands of Patagonia in 1997 and for his work on the origin and early evolution of Mesozoic birds. He is currently the Vice President of Research and Collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and director of the museum's Dinosaur Institute. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, New York after immigrating from Argentina. Chiappe is currently the curator of the award winning Dinosaur H...
Go to Profile#3492
John H. Ryther
#83131
Overall Influence
#3493
Thomas J. Givnish
#79214
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Joseph Givnish is an American botanist, ecologist, and evolutionary biologist, holder of the Henry Allan Gleason Chair in Botany and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He has written extensively on speciation, adaptive radiation, and determinants of diversity in several plant groups, including Bromeliaceae, Rapateaceae, Orchidaceae as well as the Hawaiian lobelioids.
Go to Profile#3494
James Frederick Leckman
#83159
Overall Influence
#3495
Esmail Zanjani
#27985
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Esmail D. Zanjani is a professor and medical researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research involves growing human cells within sheep embryos. In March 2007, it was announced that Zanjani had created a human-sheep chimera. Zanjani has stated that his work involves sheep because of the blood-forming systems of sheep and humans are similar.
Go to Profile#3496
Ralph Adolphs
#83165
Overall Influence
#3497
Kenneth N. Stevens
#22352
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Kenneth Noble Stevens was the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and professor of health sciences and technology at the research laboratory of electronics at MIT. Stevens was head of the speech communication group in MIT's research laboratory of electronics , and was one of the world's leading scientists in acoustic phonetics.
Go to Profile#3498
Brian J. Enquist
#41233
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Brian Joseph Enquist is an American biologist and academic. Enquist is a Professor of Biology at the University of Arizona. He is also external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a biologist, plant biologist and an ecologist. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012 and the Ecological Society of America in 2018.
Go to Profile#3499
Rui Diogo
#66085
Overall Influence
Rui Diogo is a Portuguese American biologist, researcher, speaker, and writer at Howard University with several published scientific books, whose research covers social issues such as racism, sexism, etc., using scientific data from many different fields of science . His studies regarding evolutionary remnants in human babies in the womb has been widely reported. In 2017, he proposed Organic Nonoptimal Constrained Evolution.
Go to Profile#3500
Boris Khodorov
#60260
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Boris Khodorov was a Soviet and Russian physiologist, M.D., D.Sc., professor of physiology, and head of the Cell Physiology section of Moscow Physiological Society . Biography Boris Israelevitch Khodorov was born in Kerch, on 17 January 1922. He graduated from in 1944 and then served with distinction as senior doctor in the Howitzer Artillery Regiment of the First Byelorussian Front in Byelorussia, Poland, and Germany. In 1946, Khodorov was dismissed from the Red Army and started his scientific career in Moscow as a research assistant at the V.I. Lenin Moscow State Pedagogical University . There he received his PhD in biology .
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