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

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#3501

Harry Smith

#66243

Overall Influence

1921 - 2011 (90 years)

Harry Smith was a British microbiologist, and Professor of Microbiology, at the University of Birmingham. Life He was born in Northampton, the son of bookmaker Harry Smith, was educated at Northampton Grammar School and earned a degree in pharmacy at University College Nottingham in 1942. For the rest of the war he worked at Boots in Nottingham on the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, and was awarded a BSc in Chemistry by the University of London.

#3502

Lawrence I. Gilbert

#83230

Overall Influence

#3503

Junhyong Kim

#69267

Overall Influence

Junhyong Kim is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Endowed Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of over eighty published scientific papers. Career Kim specializes in computational biology, genomics, and evolutionary biology. Originally from South Korea, he received his undergraduate degree in Microbiology at Seoul National University. During his undergraduate years, he became strongly interested in computer science and programming. He developed a program to fold tRNA sequences published in the Korean Journal of Biochemistry. This paper is now known as the first computational biology paper published in Korea.

#3504

Anthony Zador

#42526

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Anthony M. Zador is an American neuroscientist and the Alle Davis Harris Professor of Biology and Chair of Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a co-founder, in 2004, of the Computational and Systems Neuroscience conference, and of the NAISYS meeting about the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Dr. Zador's research has focused on understanding the circuits of the auditory cortex in rodents. More recently, he has pioneered a new approach to connectome mapping using the methods of molecular biology, which may dramatically decrease the cost and improve t...

#3505

Craig Venter

#69060

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Areas of Specialization: Synthetic Biology Craig Venter is a biotechnologist and entrepreneur who is the founder or co/founder of Human Longevity, Inc., Synthetic Genomics, Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic and the J. Craig Venter Institute. He studied at the College of San Mateo in California before earning a BS in biochemistry and a PhD in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California, San Diego. After joining the National Institutes of Health, he began working with genomic sequencing methods. After founding his own research company, Celera Genomics, with which he shares credit for the first draft sequencing of the human genome.

#3506

Jeffrey Esko

#80193

Overall Influence

Jeffrey David Esko, Ph.D.,M.D. is currently a Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Co-Director of the Glycobiology Research and Training Center at the University of California, San Diego. His research has focuses on understanding the structure, biosynthesis and biological roles of proteoglycans in mammalian cells and model organisms. Esko popularized proteoglycans through his pioneering genetic and functional studies in cells and model organisms. He discovered the dependence of tumor formation on heparan sulfate, the first small molecule inhibitors of heparan sulfate...

#3507

Jerzy Vetulani

#27692

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Jerzy Adam Gracjan Vetulani was a Polish neuroscientist, pharmacologist and biochemist, professor of natural sciences, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Learning, one of the most frequently cited Polish scientists in the field of biomedicine after 1965.

#3508

Anne Ephrussi

#76351

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Anne Ephrussi is a French developmental and molecular biologist. Her research is focused on the study of post-transcriptional regulations such as mRNA localization and translation control in molecular biology as well as the establishment of polarity axes in cell and developmental biology. She is head of the Developmental Biology Unit and director of the EMBL International Centre for Advanced Training program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory .

#3509

Naser Kamalian

#27581

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (105 years)

Nasser Kamalian is an Iranian medical scholar who can be considered the father of modern neuropathology in Iran. He has published around 60 major articles in prominent Iranian and international medical journals, and has for 40 years been associated with Tehran University.

#3510

Ingmar Ott

#78217

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Ingmar Ott is an Estonian botanist. He was born in Tartu. In 1980, he graduated from the University of Tartu in biology. In 1984, he became affiliated with the Estonian Institute of Zoology and Botany.

#3511

Robert F. Murphy

Robert F. Murphy

#46520

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Robert F. Murphy is Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology Emeritus and Director of the M.S. Program in Automated Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to his retirement in May 2021, he was the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology as well as Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Machine Learning. He was founding Director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics at Carnegie Mellon and founded the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. He also founded the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon Uni...

#3512

Douglas G. Stuart

#61165

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Douglas G. Stuart was a Regents' professor emeritus of Physiology at the University of Arizona. Early life and career As a young man in Australia, Stuart trained to compete with the Australian team in the British Commonwealth Games as a high jumper. He came to Michigan State University on a track scholarship in 1954 to complete his BS and MS in physical education with an emphasis on mammalian physiology and the physiology of exercise. It was at MSU that Stuart developed his interest and expertise in academe ; blossomed in public speaking and leadership ; met and subsequently married an American undergraduate .

#3513

Rolf Håkanson

#83377

Overall Influence

#3514

Shane Crotty

#78571

Overall Influence

Shane Patrick Crotty is a professor of immunology in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Education and academic posts Crotty completed B.S. degrees in Biology and Writing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. He then completed his Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of California, San Francisco with Raul Andino.

#3515

Colin Patterson

#71811

Overall Influence

1933 - 1998 (65 years)

Colin Patterson FRS , was a British palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London from 1962 to his official retirement in 1993 who specialised in fossil fish and systematics, advocating the transformed cladistics school.

#3516

Shigeo Ohno

#35934

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Shigeo Ohno is a Japanese molecular biologist known for his pioneer research on Protein Kinase C and Cell Polarity. His works led to the fundamental understanding of cell polarity in response to cell signaling.

#3517

Robert J. Behnke

Robert J. Behnke

#31529

Overall Influence

1929 - 2013 (84 years)

Dr. Robert J. Behnke was an American fisheries biologist and conservationist who was recognized as a world authority on the classification of salmonid fishes. He was popularly known as "Dr. Trout" or "The Trout Doctor". His seminal work, Trout and Salmon of North America, was published in 2002. He wrote a regular column for Trout Magazine, the quarterly publication of Trout Unlimited. He was a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Colorado Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and a professor at Colorado State University in the 1970s. He became a Professor...

#3518

Gil Omenn

#62320

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Gilbert S. Omenn is an American medical doctor and researcher. He currently is the Harold T. Shapiro Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan; professor of Computational medicine & bioinformatics, Molecular medicine & genetics, Human genetics, and Public health; and the Director of the UM Center for Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics. He is the discover of Omenn syndrome, a genetic disorder that is fatal in infancy unless treated. Omenn has served as editor of the Annual Review of Public Health from 1990–1996. and as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

#3519

Kizzmekia Corbett

Kizzmekia Corbett

#58717

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Kizzmekia "Kizzy" Shanta Corbett is an American viral immunologist. She is an Assistant Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute since June 2021.

#3520

Robert J. Kurman

#83460

Overall Influence

#3521

Antoine Guisan

#83500

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Antoine Guisan is a Swiss ecologist. Biography Guisan obtained his master's degree from the University of Geneva in 1992 and from 1993 to 1996 worked on his Ph.D. at the same place. In 1997 he worked as postdoc at Stanford University in the Center for Conservation Biology department and then held the same position at the Conservatoire et Jardin Botaniques. From 1998 to 2001 he worked at the Swiss Center for Faunal Cartography and then became an assistant professor at the University of Lausanne specializing in plant biogeography and spatial ecology. As of 2007 he works as associate professor in the same place specializing in plant ecology.

#3522

Michael D. Rugg

#75065

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Michael Derek Rugg FRSE is a Distinguished Chair in Behavioral and Brain Sciences at University of Texas at Dallas. He is director of The Center for Vital Longevity in Dallas, Texas. His current research program involves the use of electrophysiological and functional magnetic resonance imaging methods to investigate the cognitive and neural bases of memory encoding and memory retrieval, as well as how and why memory function differs as a result of healthy aging or neurological disease.

#3523

Robert C. Green

Robert C. Green

#46217

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Robert C. Green is an American medical geneticist, physician, and public health researcher. He directs the Genomes2People Research Program in translational genomics and health outcomes in the Division of Genetics at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Broad Institute, and is Director of the Preventive Genomics Clinic at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Research led by Green includes clinical and research aspects of genomic and precision medicine, including the development and disclosure of Alzheimer's disease risk estimates and one of the first prospective studies of direct-to-consumer genetic testing services .

#3524

Aziz Sancar

#83536

Overall Influence

#3525

Sergio Romagnani

#83543

Overall Influence

#3526

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple

#3413

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Anthony Malcolm Daniels , also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple , is a conservative English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.

#3527

Steward Pickett

Steward Pickett

#81852

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Steward T. A. Pickett is an American plant ecologist and a distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Pickett is the recipient of the 2021 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology for "incorporating the spatial dimension into ecosystem research, in the sense of landscape and its multiple scales, and bringing it to bear in the management of coupled human-natural systems", as well the Ecologist Society of America's 2021 Eminent Ecologist Award.

#3528

Urs Jenal

#78420

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Urs Jenal is a Swiss Microbiologist and Professor at the Biozentrum University of Basel, Switzerland. Life Urs Jenal studied Experimental Biology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and received his PhD from there in 1991. Subsequently, he completed postdoctoral research at the ETH Zurich and at Stanford University, USA. Since 1996, Jenal has taught and conducted research at the Biozentrum University of Basel; first as an Assistant Professor and since 2002 as a Professor of Molecular Microbiology.

#3529

Vijay K Kuchroo

#83596

Overall Influence

#3530

Carl Barton Huffaker

#68961

Overall Influence

1914 - 1995 (81 years)

Carl Barton Huffaker was an American biologist, ecologist and agricultural entomologist. Huffaker graduated from the University of Tennessee then gaining a PhD from Ohio State University in 1942. Huffaker was one of the first entomologists to study the use of DDT to control mosquito populations. After working as a medical entomologist in Colombia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic he was recruited by Harry Scott Smith in 1946 to work as an assistant entomologist for the Division of Biological Control of the University of California. Huffaker's first assignment was the control of Klamath weed, particularly the use of Chrysolina quadrigemina.

#3531

Victor Nizet

#67099

Overall Influence

Victor Nizet is an American microbiologist who is a professor of pediatrics. He is a Distinguished Professor and Vice Chair of Basic Research at the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. He is also a Distinguished Professor at UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in La Jolla, California. He is known for his research in the areas of molecular microbiology and the innate immune system, with a particular focus on infectious diseases caused by common Gram-positive bacterial pathogens such as Group A Streptococcus, Group B Str...

#3532

Terry Erwin

#64327

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Terry Lee Erwin was an American entomologist with the Smithsonian Institution. Erwin went to Vallejo High School and then graduated in biology in 1964, followed by a masters in 1966 from San Jose State College . He went to the University of Alberta to study carabid beetles under George Ball, obtaining a Ph.D. in 1969 followed by a post-doctoral stint at Harvard under P. Jackson Darlington, Jr. He took up an entomologist position in the United States National Museum but took a year off to study carabid beetles at the University of Lund under Carl H. Lindroth.

#3533

Janis Roze

#35451

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (100 years)

Jānis Arnolds Roze, born in Latvia in 1926, is a herpetologist and Professor of Biology Emeritus of City College and Graduate School of the City University of New York. He was professionally associated with the American Museum of Natural History and the United Nations. A founder of the International Center for Integrative Studies, he published several books and narrated several videos on Creative Evolution. He co-edited What Does it Mean to Be Human.

#3534

Gretchen Hofmann

#40538

Overall Influence

Gretchen Hofmann is professor of ecological physiology of marine organisms at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.S. from the University of Wyoming, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Environmental, Population and Organismal Biology.

#3535

Richard Harland

#77539

Overall Influence

Richard M. Harland is CH Li Distinguished Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Education Harland completed his PhD at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Ron Laskey on regulation of DNA replication in Xenopus embryos.

#3536

David Smith

#49008

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Sir David Cecil Smith was a British botanist. Smith was most notable for his research into the biology of symbiosis and became a leading authority on it. Smith discovered that lichens and Radiata shared a similar biological mechanism in carbohydrate metabolism. Further research by Smith demonstrated similar processes in organisms that worked within a symbiotic relationship.

#3537

Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher

#23427

Overall Influence

1940 - 2023 (83 years)

Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher was an Ethiopian scientist who won the Right Livelihood Award in 2000 "for his exemplary work to safeguard biodiversity and the traditional rights of farmers and communities to their genetic resources."

#3538

Peter T. Macklem

#83692

Overall Influence

#3539

Ruth Sonntag Nussenzweig

#60628

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Ruth Sonntag Nussenzweig was an Austrian-Brazilian immunologist specializing in the development of malaria vaccines. In a career spanning over 60 years, she was primarily affiliated with New York University . She served as C.V. Starr Professor of Medical and Molecular Parasitology at Langone Medical Center, Research Professor at the NYU Department of Pathology, and finally Professor Emerita of Microbiology and Pathology at the NYU Department of Microbiology.

#3540

James P. Kennett

#81386

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

James P. Kennett is an American paleoceanographer. Kennet has a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, with a thesis on the Kapitean Stage in New Zealand. In 1986, Kennett became the founding editor of Paleoceanography, and in May 2000, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a cofounder and member of the Comet Research Group . He is widely known for his contributions to the controversial and disputed Younger Dryas impact hypothesis which asserts that the Clovis culture was destroyed by a shower of comets. His most widely disseminated paper was a collabo...

#3541

Henry Friesen

#56421

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Henry George Friesen is a Canadian endocrinologist, a distinguished professor emeritus of the University of Manitoba and the discoverer of human prolactin, a hormone which stimulates lactation in mammary glands.

#3542

David M. Knipe

#77629

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

David Mahan Knipe is the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in the Department of Microbiology at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts and co-chief editor of the reference book Fields Virology. He returned to the Chair of the Program in Virology at Harvard Medical School in 2019, having previously held the position from 2004 through 2016 and served as interim Co-Chair of the Microbiology and Immunobiology Department from 2016 through 2018.

#3543

Nancy Turner

#60732

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Nancy Jean Turner is a Canadian ethnobiologist, originally qualified in botany, who has done extensive research work with the indigenous peoples of British Columbia, the results of which she has documented in a number of books and numerous articles.

#3544

Jacquelyn Gill

#39902

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist and assistant professor of climate science at the University of Maine. She has worked on such as the relationship between megafauna and vegetation in the Pleistocene, and the sediment cores of Jamaica. Gill is also a science communicator on climate change.

#3545

Nicholas Harberd

#63930

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Nicholas Paul Harberd is Sibthorpian Professor of Plant Science and former head of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. Education Harberd earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours, a Master of Arts, and PhD in 1981, from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of Christ's College, Cambridge.

#3546

Janusz Bujnicki

#77774

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Janusz Marek Bujnicki is a Polish biologist specializing in molecular biology and bioinformatics, professor of biological sciences, head of the Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Protein Engineering at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw and a research group at the Laboratory of Bioinformatics at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.

#3547

Camilla Pang

#69124

Overall Influence

1993 - Present (33 years)

Camilla Sih Mai Pang is a British computational biologist, writer, and autism advocate. In 2020, she was awarded the Royal Society Prize for Science Books for her memoir, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships.

#3548

Michael H. Gelb

Michael H. Gelb

#55860

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Professor Michael H. Gelb is an American biochemist and chemist specializing in enzymes and particularly those of medical significance. He is the Boris and Barbara L. Weinstein Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also teaches Honors Organic Chemistry, Chemical Biology and Enzymology.

#3549

Morten Kringelbach

#62928

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Morten L Kringelbach is a professor of neuroscience at University of Oxford, UK and Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the director of the 'Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing', fellow of Linacre College, Oxford and board member of the Empathy Museum.

#3550

James A. Estes

#78871

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

James Allen Estes is an American ecologist and Distinguished Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz , known for his studies of sea otters and kelp forest ecology. Born in Sacramento, California, he graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1967, earned a master's degree in Biology from Washington State University in 1969, and a Ph.D. in biology and statistics from the University of Arizona in 1974. He worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey from 1974 to 2007 before joining the UCSC faculty. He is a wildlife ecologist known for his work on ecosystem effect of large predators on ecosystems.

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