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,
#351
Carl Zimmer
#5224
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Carl Zimmer is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity. The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as The New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic. He is a fellow at Yale University's Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio's Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life.
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Dick Swaab
#7360
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Dick Ferdinand Swaab is a Dutch physician and neurobiologist . He is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Amsterdam and was until 2005 Director of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences .
Go to Profile#353
Thierry Lodé
#13039
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Thierry Lodé is a French biologist and professor of evolutionary ecology in a CNRS lab at the University of Rennes 1. His work deals mainly with sexual conflict. Selected works Thierry Lodé Darwin et après ? Manifeste pour une écologie évolutive 2014 Eds Odile Jacobs, ParisThierry Lodé La biodiversité amoureuse, sexe et évolution 2011 Eds Odile Jacob Thierry Lodé La guerre des sexes chez les animaux, une histoire naturelle de la sexualité 2006 Eds Odile Jacob Thierry Lodé Les stratégies de reproduction des animaux 2001 Éditions Dunod Masson SciencesThierry Lodé Génétique des populations 1998 ...
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Walter M. Fitch
#10685
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Walter Monroe Fitch was a pioneering American researcher in molecular evolution. Education and career Fitch attended University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with an A.B. in chemistry in 1953 and a Ph.D. in comparative biochemistry in 1958. Fitch spent 24 years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed by three years at the University of Southern California and then was professor of molecular evolution at the University of California, Irvine, until his death. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a Foreign Member of the London Linnean Society.
Go to Profile#355
Loren Coleman
#8433
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Loren Coleman is an American cryptozoologist who has written over 40 books on a number of topics, including the pseudoscience and subculture of cryptozoology. Early life Coleman was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in Decatur, Illinois. He was the oldest of four children. His father was a firefighter and his mother a homemaker. He graduated in 1965 from MacArthur High School. He studied anthropology and zoology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and psychiatric social work at the Simmons College School of Social Work in Boston. He did further studies in doctoral-level anthropology at Brandeis University and sociology at the University of New Hampshire.
Go to Profile#356
Bengt I. Samuelsson
#4909
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson is a Swedish biochemist. He shared with Sune K. Bergström and John R. Vane the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances.
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Steven Salzberg
#4560
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Steven Lloyd Salzberg is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also Director of the Center for Computational Biology.
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Kalevi Kull
#3237
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kalevi Kull is a biosemiotics professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He graduated from the University of Tartu in 1975. His earlier work dealt with ethology and field ecology. He has studied the mechanisms of species coexistence in species-rich communities and developed mathematical modelling in ecophysiology. Since 1975, he has been the main organiser of annual meetings of theoretical biology in Estonia. In 1992, he became a Professor of Ecophysiology in the University of Tartu. In 1997, he joined the Department of Semiotics, and became a Professor in Biosemiotics. From 2006 to 2018, he was the Head of the Department of Semiotics in the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Go to Profile#359
Ira Mellman
#12699
Overall Influence
Ira Mellman is an American cell biologist who discovered endosomes. He serves as Vice President of Research Oncology at Genentech in South San Francisco, California. Research Mellman's work has examined the role of endocytosis in cell metabolism and human disease. He was among the first to characterize the endosomal system. Later projects include investigation of LDL cholesterol receptor internalization, cellular sorting machinery, and the cellular basis for immunity. He is an authority on the cell biological mechanisms and function of dendritic cells, the cell type responsible for initiat...
Go to Profile#360
Charles A. Dinarello
#12741
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Charles A. Dinarello is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado at Denver. He is an expert on inflammatory cytokines, specifically Interleukin 1. Education and career Dinarello received his Doctor of Medicine in 1969 at Yale University and since 1996, he is Professor of Medicine at University of Colorado School of Medicine. He is also Professor of Experimental Medicine at the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Dinarello is considered one of the founding fathers of cytokines having purified and cloned interleukin-1. This important step established the validation of cytokines as mediators of disease, particularly of inflammation.
Go to Profile#361
Albert Schatz
#6669
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Albert Israel Schatz was an American microbiologist and academic who discovered streptomycin, the first antibiotic known to be effective for the treatment of tuberculosis. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1942 with a bachelor's degree in soil microbiology, and received his doctorate from Rutgers in 1945. His PhD research led directly to the discovery of streptomycin.
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Gustav Nossal
#6254
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Sir Gustav Victor Joseph Nossal is an Austrian-born Australian research biologist. He is famous for his contributions to the fields of antibody formation and immunological tolerance. Early life and education Nossal's family was from Vienna, Austria. He was born four weeks prematurely in Bad Ischl while his mother was on holiday. His family left their home town of Vienna for Australia in 1939 following Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria. As his father's grandparents were Jewish, he was also considered Jewish and at risk of being sent to concentration camps. In an interview with Adam Spencer...
Go to Profile#363
Eric N. Olson
#12721
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Eric N. Olson is a professor and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology, Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Science, the Annie and Willie Nelson Professor of Stem Cell Research, and the Pogue Distinguished Chair in Research on Cardiac Birth Defects for the UT Southwestern Medical Center. He earned a B.A. in chemistry and biology and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Wake Forest University. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Washington University School of Medicine. Olson and his team have worked to better understand how the heart develops and works, as well as the behaviors of diseases and disorders of the cardiovascular and skeletal muscle tissue.
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Kevin Padian
#6346
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Kevin Padian is an American paleontologist. He is Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Curator of Paleontology, University of California Museum of Paleontology, and was President of the National Center for Science Education from 2007 to 2008. Padian's area of interest is in vertebrate evolution, especially the origins of flight and the evolution of birds from theropod dinosaurs. He served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, and his testimony was repeatedly cited in the court's decision.
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Charles Duncan Michener
#11177
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Charles Duncan Michener was an American entomologist born in Pasadena, California. He was a leading expert on bees, his magnum opus being The Bees of the World published in 2000. Biography Much of his career was devoted to the systematics and natural history of bees. His first peer-reviewed publication was in 1934, at the age of 16. He received his BS in 1939 and his PhD in entomology in 1941, from the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in California until 1942, when he became an assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
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Charles Birch
#7772
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Louis Charles Birch was an Australian geneticist specialising in population ecology and was also well known as a theologian, writing widely on the topic of science and religion, winning the Templeton Prize in 1990. The prize recognised his work ascribing intrinsic value to all life.
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Martin Nowak
#7562
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Martin Andreas Nowak is an Austrian-born professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. He is one of the leading researchers in the field of mathematical biology. He made contributions to the theory of evolution, cooperation, virus dynamics, and cancer dynamics. Nowak held professorships at Oxford University and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, before being recruited by Harvard in 2003. He was the director of Harvard's program for evolutionary dynamics from 2003 until 2020. He is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and in the Department of Organismic and...
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Steven Rosenberg
#8944
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Steven A. Rosenberg is an American cancer researcher and surgeon, chief of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and a Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He pioneered the development of immunotherapy that has resulted in the first effective immunotherapies and the development of gene therapy. He is the first researcher to successfully insert foreign genes into humans.
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Bruce Beutler
#7384
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Bruce Alan Beutler is an American immunologist and geneticist. Together with Jules A. Hoffmann, he received one-half of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for "discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity." Beutler discovered the long-elusive receptor for lipopolysaccharide . He did so by identifying spontaneous mutations in the gene coding for mouse Toll-like receptor 4 in two unrelated strains of LPS-refractory mice and proving they were responsible for that phenotype. Subsequently, and chiefly through the work of Shizuo Akira, other TLRs were shown to detect signa...
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Antje Boetius
#13153
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Antje Boetius is a German marine biologist. She is a professor of geomicrobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, University of Bremen. Boetius received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in March 2009 for her study of sea bed microorganisms that affect the global climate. She is also the director of Germany's polar research hub, the Alfred Wegener Institute.
Go to Profile#371
Marcus Raichle
#6916
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Marcus E. Raichle is an American neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, Missouri. He is a professor in the Department of Radiology with joint appointments in Neurology, Neurobiology and Biomedical Engineering. His research over the past 40 years has focused on the nature of functional brain imaging signals arising from PET and fMRI and the application of these techniques to the study of the human brain in health and disease. He received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience “for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition", together wit...
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Candace Pert
#6519
Overall Influence
1946 - 2013 (67 years)
Candace Beebe Pert was an American neuroscientist and pharmacologist who discovered the opioid receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain. Early life and education She was born on June 26, 1946, in Manhattan, New York City.
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Mark Mattson
#9483
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Mark P. Mattson Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Early life and education Mattson received his B.S. in Zoology from Iowa State University in 1979, his M.S. in Biology at University of North Texas in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Biology at the University of Iowa in 1986. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Colorado State University.
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Arthur Guyton
#6637
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Arthur Clifton Guyton was an American physiologist. Guyton is well known for his Textbook of Medical Physiology, which quickly became the standard text on the subject in medical schools. The first edition was published in 1956, the 10th edition in 2000 , and the 12th edition in 2010. The 14th edition is the latest version available. It is the world's best-selling medical physiology textbook and has been translated into at least 15 languages.
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Michael Karin
#16726
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Karin is an Israeli-American Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, Ben and Wanda Hildyard Chair for Mitochondrial and Metabolic Diseases, and American Cancer Society Research Professor at the University of California, San Diego.
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Brenda Schulman
#11241
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Brenda Schulman is an American biochemist and structural biologist who is a Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried, Bavaria. Schulman's research interests focus on a class of proteins known as ubiquitin-like proteins.
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Malcolm Casadaban
#14667
Overall Influence
1949 - 2009 (60 years)
Malcolm Casadaban was associate professor of molecular genetics, cell biology and microbiology at the University of Chicago. Casadaban died following an accidental laboratory exposure to an attenuated strain of Yersinia pestis, a bacterium that causes plague.
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Peter H. Raven
#7304
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Peter Hamilton Raven is an American botanist and environmentalist, notable as the longtime director, now President Emeritus, of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Early life On June 13, 1936, Raven was born in Shanghai, China to American parents, Walter Francis Raven and Isabelle Marion Breen. His father's uncle Frank Jay Raven was, for a time, one of the wealthiest Americans in China, but was later jailed in a banking scandal. That incident and Japanese aggression in China led the Raven family to return to San Francisco, CA in the late 1930s.
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Robert Hinde
#2408
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Robert Aubrey Hinde was a British zoologist, ethologist and psychologist. He served as the Emeritus Royal Society Research Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. Hinde is best known for his ethological contributions to the fields of animal behaviour and developmental psychology.
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Walter Munk
#5505
Overall Influence
1917 - 2019 (102 years)
Walter Heinrich Munk was an American physical oceanographer. He was one of the first scientists to bring statistical methods to the analysis of oceanographic data. Munk worked on a wide range of topics, including surface waves, geophysical implications of variations in the Earth's rotation, tides, internal waves, deep-ocean drilling into the sea floor, acoustical measurements of ocean properties, sea level rise, and climate change. His work won awards including the National Medal of Science, the Kyoto Prize, and induction to the French Legion of Honour.
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Adriel Johnson
#16569
Overall Influence
1957 - 2010 (53 years)
Adriel Duland Johnson Sr. was an American biologist and faculty member at the University of Alabama in Huntsville whose research focused on areas of cell biology and nutritional physiology. He was one of three faculty members who was killed in the shooting on the UAH campus on February 12, 2010.
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Victor A. McKusick
#8048
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Victor Almon McKusick was an American internist and medical geneticist, and Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He was a proponent of the mapping of the human genome due to its use for studying congenital diseases. He is well known for his studies of the Amish. He was the original author and, until his death, remained chief editor of Mendelian Inheritance in Man and its online counterpart Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man . He is widely known as the "father of medical genetics".
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Jeremy M. Berg
#9796
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jeremy Mark Berg was founding director of the University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Personalized Medicine. He holds positions as Associate Senior Vice Chancellor for Science Strategy and Planning and Professor of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2016 to 2019, Berg was editor in chief of the Science journals.
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Simon A. Levin
#8602
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Simon Asher Levin is an American ecologist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University. He specializes in using mathematical modeling and empirical studies in the understanding of macroscopic patterns of ecosystems and biological diversities.
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David Suzuki
#1902
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
David Takayoshi Suzuki is a Canadian academic, science broadcaster, and environmental activist. Suzuki earned a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961, and was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. Since the mid-1970s, Suzuki has been known for his television and radio series, documentaries and books about nature and the environment. He is best known as host and narrator of the popular and long-running CBC Television science program The Nature of Things, seen in over 40 countries. He is also well kn...
Go to Profile#386
Daniel Simberloff
#14277
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Daniel Simberloff is an American biologist and ecologist. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. He is currently Gore Hunger Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Tennessee, editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Invasions, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Susan Lindquist
#9122
Overall Influence
1949 - 2016 (67 years)
Susan Lee Lindquist, ForMemRS was an American professor of biology at MIT specializing in molecular biology, particularly the protein folding problem within a family of molecules known as heat-shock proteins, and prions. Lindquist was a member and former director of the Whitehead Institute and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010.
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Knut Schmidt-Nielsen
#14261
Overall Influence
1915 - 2007 (92 years)
Knut Schmidt-Nielsen was a prominent figure in the field of comparative physiology and Professor of Physiology Emeritus at Duke University. Background Born in Trondheim, Norway. He was educated in Oslo and Copenhagen. He became a student in the laboratory of August Krogh in Copenhagen in 1937. Schmidt-Nielsen moved to the United States, where he studied at Swarthmore College, Stanford University, and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He was the leader of expeditions to the Sahara Desert in 1953–54 and central Australia in 1962. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Trustee of Mt....
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Jeffrey I. Gordon
#8131
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jeffrey Ivan Gordon is a biologist and the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is internationally known for his research on gastrointestinal development and how gut microbial communities affect normal intestinal function, shape various aspects of human physiology including our nutritional status, and affect predisposition to diseases. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the Na...
Go to Profile#390
Hartmut Michel
#3281
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hartmut Michel is a German biochemist, who received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determination of the first crystal structure of an integral membrane protein, a membrane-bound complex of proteins and co-factors that is essential to photosynthesis.
Go to Profile#391
Drew Weissman
#7372
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Drew Weissman is an American physician and immunologist known for his contributions to RNA biology. Weissman is the inaugural Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, and professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania .
Go to Profile#392
David Sloan Wilson
#1608
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He is a son of author Sloan Wilson, and co-founder of the Evolution Institute, and co-founder of the spinoff nonprofit Prosocial World.
Go to Profile#393
Frank Fenner
#4865
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Frank John Fenner was an Australian scientist with a distinguished career in the field of virology. His two greatest achievements are cited as overseeing the eradication of smallpox, and the attempted control of Australia's rabbit plague through the introduction of Myxoma virus.
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Cynthia Kenyon
#9351
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cynthia Jane Kenyon is an American molecular biologist and biogerontologist known for her genetic dissection of aging in a widely used model organism, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. She is the vice president of aging research at Calico Research Labs, and emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco .
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Leonard Adleman
#542
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Leonard Adleman is an American computer scientist. He is one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm, for which he received the 2002 Turing Award. He is also known for the creation of the field of DNA computing.
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Rattan Lal
#15902
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Rattan Lal is a soil scientist. His work focuses on regenerative agriculture through which soil can help resolve global issues such as climate change, food security and water quality. He has received the Japan Prize, and the World Food Prize, among others, for his work.
Go to Profile#397
Li-Meng Yan
#6262
Overall Influence
Li-Meng Yan or Yan Limeng is a Chinese virologist, known for her publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. Her publications have been widely dismissed as flawed by the scientific community.
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Eva Klein
#14443
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Eva Klein is a Hungarian-Swedish scientist. Klein has worked at the Karolinska Institute since leaving Hungary in 1947. She is regarded as a founder of cancer immunology. Her life and career choices as a young Jewish woman were constrained by discrimination, and she survived the late stages of German occupation in hiding. A medical doctor with a PhD in biology, she has worked in cancer immunology and virology.
Go to Profile#399
Elaine Fuchs
#10123
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Elaine V. Fuchs is an American cell biologist famous for her work on the biology and molecular mechanisms of mammalian skin and skin diseases, who helped lead the modernization of dermatology. Fuchs pioneered reverse genetics approaches, which assess protein function first and then assess its role in development and disease. In particular, Fuchs researches skin stem cells and their production of hair and skin. She is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development at The Rockefeller University.
Go to Profile#400
Donald Griffin
#6990
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Donald Redfield Griffin was an American professor of zoology at various universities who conducted seminal research in animal behavior, animal navigation, acoustic orientation and sensory biophysics. In 1938, while an undergraduate at Harvard University, he began studying the navigational method of bats, which he identified as animal echolocation in 1944. In The Question of Animal Awareness , he argued that animals are conscious like humans. Griffin was the originator of the concept of mentophobia: the denial of the consciousness of other animals by scientists.
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