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,
#3551
Lesley Joy Rogers
#64126
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Lesley Joy Rogers is a neurobiologist and emeritus professor of neuroscience and animal behaviour at the University of New England. Academic career and education Rogers obtained Bachelor of Science with honours at the University of Adelaide in 1964. She worked in various positions at Harvard University, New England Medical Centre Hospital, University of Sussex, and Open University. She obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in 1971 and a Doctor of Science in 1987, both from the University of Sussex.
Go to Profile#3552
Robert J. Desnick
#63832
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert J. Desnick is an American human geneticist whose basic and translational research accomplishments include significant discoveries in genomics, pharmacogenetics, gene therapy, personalized medicine, and the treatment of genetic diseases. His translational research has led to the development of the enzyme replacement therapy and the chaperone therapy for Fabry disease, ERT for Niemann–Pick disease type B, and the RNA Interference Therapy for the Acute Hepatic Porphyrias.
Go to Profile#3553
George K. Aghajanian
#83872
Overall Influence
#3554
Jorge E. Galán
#76357
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jorge Enrique Galán is an Argentinian-American microbiologist who specializes in infectious disease, bacterial pathogenesis including Salmonella. Research Jorge Galán started his career as an associate professor at SUNY Stony Brook within the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. In 1998, Galan joined the Yale University Faculty.
Go to Profile#3555
Anne Rasa
#74412
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Olwen Anne Elisabeth Rasa was a British ethologist, known for her long-duration study of the social behaviour of the dwarf mongoose in Kenya. She had studied aggression among coral reef fish under the pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz. Her fieldwork in Kenya's Taru Desert led to a book, Mongoose Watch: A Family Observed, and to a popular German television series, Expedition ins Tierreich. She later studied social behaviour in the yellow mongoose and the sub-social tenebrionid beetle Parastizopus armaticeps.
Go to Profile#3556
Kevin Thiele
#65691
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Kevin R. Thiele is currently an adjunct associate professor at the University of Western Australia and the director of Taxonomy Australia. He was the curator of the Western Australian Herbarium from 2006 to 2015. His research interests include the systematics of the plant families Proteaceae, Rhamnaceae and Violaceae, and the conservation ecology of grassy woodland ecosystems. He also works in biodiversity informatics, developing and teaching the development of interactive multi-access keys, and has been involved in the design of software for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
Go to Profile#3557
Subhadeep Chatterjee
#59716
Overall Influence
Subhadeep Chatterjee is an Indian molecular biologist and a scientist at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics . A member of Guha Research Conference, he is known for his studies on plant-microbe interactions and heads the Lab of Plant-Microbe Interactions at CDFD where he hosts several researchers.
Go to Profile#3558
Teja Tscharntke
#83987
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#3559
Brigitte Baptiste
#33824
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Brigitte Luis Guillermo Baptiste, is a Colombian cultural landscape ecologist and an expert on environmental issues and biodiversity in Colombia. She is a member of the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel of the Intergovernmental Science and Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and has been part of the national representation to the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. She served as director of the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute from 2011 until 2019. In September 2019, Baptiste became the director of Universidad Ean. She consider th...
Go to Profile#3560
Elisabeth Gantt
#80755
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Elisabeth Gantt is a botanist, known for her work in plant physiology and structure. Born in Yugoslavia, she later immigrated to the United States, where she got her Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Her work mostly focused on photosynthesis, especially that of algae. Today, she is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where she still studies and teaches botany and cell biology, which is a part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Her work has garnered her the Darbaker Prize from the Botanical Society of America in 1958 and the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1994.
Go to Profile#3561
Patrick O. Brown
#81230
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Patrick O'Reilly Brown is an American scientist and businessman who is the founder of Impossible Foods Inc. and professor emeritus in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University. Brown is co-founder of the Public Library of Science, inventor of the DNA microarray, and a former investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Go to Profile#3562
Dietmar Werner Hutmacher
#84053
Overall Influence
#3563
Ian Glynn
#76725
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Ian Michael Glynn FRS FRCP was a British biologist and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Glynn was educated at City of London School, then Trinity College, Cambridge and University College London Hospital.
Go to Profile#3564
Richard A. Friedman
#20442
Overall Influence
Richard Alan Friedman is professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, attending psychiatrist at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital and director of Psychopharmacology at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. He is an expert in the pharmacologic treatment of personality, mood and anxiety disorders, obsessive–compulsive disorder, PTSD and refractory depression.
Go to Profile#3565
Helen Blau
#76097
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Helen Margaret Blau is an American biologist and the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation Professor and Director of the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is known for establishing the reversibility of the mammalian differentiated state. Her landmark papers showed that nuclear reprogramming and the activation of novel programs of gene expression were possible, overturning the prevailing view that the differentiated state was fixed and irreversible. Her discoveries opened the door for cellular reprogramming and its application to stem ce...
Go to Profile#3566
Carole LaBonne
#48182
Overall Influence
Carole LaBonne is a Developmental and Stem Cell Biologist at Northwestern University. She is the Erastus O. Haven Professor of Life Sciences, and Chair of the Department of Molecular Biosciences. Education and early career LaBonne received her bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, doing research with Sayeeda Zain on the molecular basis of Alzheimer's disease. Inspired by the work of famed embryologist and Rochester emeritus professor Johannes Holtfreter, LaBonne pursued doctoral work at Harvard University studying germ layer formation using Xenopus as a model. As a National Scien...
Go to Profile#3567
Letitia Obeng
#35136
Overall Influence
1925 - 2023 (98 years)
Letitia Eva Takyibea Obeng was the first Ghanaian woman to obtain a degree in zoology and the first to be awarded a doctorate. She is described as "the grandmother of female scientists in Ghana". Early life and education Letitia Obeng was born at Anum in the Eastern Region on 10 January 1925. She attended a primary school in Abetifi, Kwahu and a middle school in Kyebi. Between 1939 and 1946, she had her secondary school education at Achimota College. While at school she took the London University International Examination to continue her education, courtesy of a government scholarship at the University of Birmingham , where she was the only African female student on the Edgbaston campus.
Go to Profile#3568
Alice Mossie Brues
#46809
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Alice Mossie Brues was a physical anthropologist. Biography Alice was the daughter of Charles Thomas Brues, an entomologist at Harvard University and her botanist mother, Beirne Barrett Brues. Alice was a naturalist who specialised in botany. During her youth she was often assigned the task of collecting insects from plants by her parents and her mother in 1924 published a diary work of the families observations. In 1933, Alice graduated from Bryn Mawr College, majoring in philosophy and psychology. Later studying under Earnest Hooton, she obtained a PhD from Harvard in 1940 in physical anth...
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Eitan Tchernov
#72734
Overall Influence
1935 - 2002 (67 years)
Eitan Tchernov was an author and professor of biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Tchernov was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and received a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1966. He chaired the Center for the Study & Management of the Environment in 1980 and the High Professional Committee of the Authority of Nature Reserves from 1979 to 1982.
Go to Profile#3570
Alexander Borst
#62197
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alexander "Axel" Borst is a German neurobiologist. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence and head of the department Circuits – Computation – Models. Borst studied biology at the University of Würzburg, where he obtained his PhD as a member of Martin Heisenberg's group. He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. Afterwards, he led an Independent Junior Research Group at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society. He was professor the University of California, Berkeley. In 2001, h...
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Eric Manvers Shooter
#78113
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Eric Manvers Shooter was an English scientist known for investigating the biochemistry of nerve growth factor . From 1961 onwards he was affiliated with Stanford University School of Medicine, where he was founding chairman of the Department of Neurobiology .
Go to Profile#3572
Edward J. Goetzl
#84168
Overall Influence
#3573
John W. Funder
#84201
Overall Influence
#3574
Ruth Turner
#73937
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Ruth Dixon Turner was a pioneering U.S. marine biologist and malacologist. She was the world's expert on Teredinidae or shipworms, a taxonomic family of wood-boring bivalve mollusks which severely damage wooden marine installations.
Go to Profile#3575
Frank Sundler
#84235
Overall Influence
#3576
W. Farnsworth Loomis
#84239
Overall Influence
#3577
Takashi Kadowaki
#84249
Overall Influence
#3578
Thomas Peter Singer
#84257
Overall Influence
#3579
Christine Maggs
#43088
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Christine Adair Maggs is a British phycologist. Formerly Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science & Technology at Bournemouth University, she was the first Chief Scientist of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, retiring in 2022. She is now an independent non-executive Director of Ocean Harvest Technology https://oceanharvesttechnology.com/corporate-governance/board-of-directors/
Go to Profile#3580
Tom Curran
#65334
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Thomas Curran FRS is a Scottish medical researcher. He is the Executive Director and Chief Scientific Officer of the Children’s Mercy Research Institute at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, where he is also the Donald J. Hall Eminent Scholar in Pediatric Research. He is also a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and a Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. Before taking his current positions in 2016, he was a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Sc...
Go to Profile#3581
Jordan S Pober
#84272
Overall Influence
#3582
Glenda Halliday
#82067
Overall Influence
Glenda Margaret Halliday is an Australian neuroscientist. As of 2021, she is a professor at the University of Sydney and research fellow in the National Health and Medical Research Council . She was named 2022 NSW Scientist of the Year.
Go to Profile#3583
Rex M. C. Dawson
#84293
Overall Influence
#3584
Albert Sjoerdsma
#84305
Overall Influence
#3585
Balázs Gulyás
#39802
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Balázs Gulyás is a Hungarian neurobiologist. Personalia Gulyás is a Hungarian born neurobiologist based, since 1988, in Stockholm, working at the Karolinska Institute. Since 2013, while keeping his professorship at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, he has been one of the founding professors of the Imperial College London-Nanyang Technological University's Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Singapore where he is responsible for Translational Neuroscience and is the Scientific Director of Neuroscience and Mental Health.
Go to Profile#3586
Richard K. Wilson
#47477
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Richard K. Wilson is a leading American molecular geneticist. He is the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. He received his A.B. degree from Miami University in Ohio in 1981, his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 1986, and was a Research Fellow in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology . In 1990, Dr. Wilson joined the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine where he co-founded the Genome Sequencing Center/McDonnell Genome Institute.
Go to Profile#3587
Harley McAdams
#72840
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Harley H. McAdams is an American physicist, microbial geneticist, and developmental biologist. McAdams and his collaborators have published foundational insights on the nature of genetic regulatory logic and cell biology, the molecular basis for inevitable random variation levels of protein production between different cells, and genetic logic circuits that control the bacterial cell cycle. McAdams is married to Lucy Shapiro. They were jointly awarded the 2009 John Scott Medal for “bringing the methods of electrical circuit analysis to the description of genetic networks of the simple bacteri...
Go to Profile#3588
Ruth Smith Lloyd
#66831
Overall Influence
1917 - 1995 (78 years)
Ruth Smith Lloyd was a 20th-century scientist whose research focused on fertility, the relationship of sex hormones to growth, and the female sex cycle. She earned a PhD in the field of anatomy from Western Reserve University in 1941, making her the first African-American woman to have reached this achievement. Lloyd worked on the faculty of medicine at Howard University from 1942 to 1977. She married physician Sterling Morrison Lloyd in 1939, and they had three children: Marilyn, Sterling and David. She died of cancer in 1995.
Go to Profile#3589
P. N. Rangarajan
#40492
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Pundi Narasimhan Rangarajan is an Indian biochemist, virologist and a professor at the department of biochemistry of the Indian Institute of Science. Prof Rangarajan is currently the Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at Indian Institute of Science. Known for his research on eukaryotic gene expression, Rangarajan is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. National Academy of Sciences, India, Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for sci...
Go to Profile#3590
Arthur B. Chapman
#60330
Overall Influence
1908 - 2004 (96 years)
Arthur Barclay Chapman was the University of Wisconsin–Madison's "most accomplished animal genetic researcher." Early life and education Chapman was born in Windermere, Westmorland, England. The son of William Daniel Chapman, a physician, and his wife Nora Moss Chapman, Arthur "Chappie" Chapman attended St. Bees School until the age of sixteen, when he decided to become a sheep farmer in New Zealand. En route in 1925, he came to the United States, but got only as far as Pullman, Washington, where on the advice of a relative he took a course in animal husbandry at Washington State University. He stayed for five years, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in 1930.
Go to Profile#3591
P. Roy Vagelos
#5765
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Pindaros Roy Vagelos is an American physician and business executive, who was president and chief executive officer and chairman of the American pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. . Since 1995, Vagelos has served as chairman of the board of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Go to Profile#3592
Donald Voet
#70900
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
Donald Herman Voet was an American biochemist who was emeritus associate professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. His laboratory used x-ray crystallography to understand structure-function relationships in proteins. He and his wife, Judith G. Voet, are authors of biochemistry text books that are widely used in undergraduate and graduate curricula.
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Geraldine Seydoux
#54369
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Geraldine C. Seydoux is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics , the Huntington Sheldon Professor in Medical Discovery , and the Vice Dean for Basic Research at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Go to Profile#3594
Dean Hamer
#57583
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Dean Hamer is an American geneticist, author, and filmmaker. He is known for his research on the role of genetics in sexual orientation and for a series of popular books and documentaries that have changed the understanding and perceptions of human sexuality and gender identity.
Go to Profile#3595
Louis Bernatchez
#80120
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Louis Bernatchez was a Canadian professor of genetics at Laval University and a Canada Research Chair in genomics and conservation of aquatic resources. Select awards and honours 2001 - Michel-Jurdant Prize, ACFAS2011 - Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science2011 - Fellow, Royal Society of Canada2012 - Prix Marie-Victorin, Government of Quebec2020 - Knight, National Order of Quebec
Go to Profile#3596
Sudhir Kumar Sopory
#68894
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sudhir Kumar Sopory is an Indian educationist, plant physiologist, scientist and former vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is known to be the first to purify a protein kinase C activity from plants and is credited with the identification of topoisomerase as a substrate of protein kinase C. He is an elected Fellow of several major Indian science academies and The World Academy of Sciences and is a recipient of many honours, including the 1987 Shanti Swarup Bhatangar Prize, the highest Indian award in the science and technology categories. The Government of India awa...
Go to Profile#3597
Tom Rich
#42221
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Thomas Rich , generally known as Tom Rich, is an Australian palaeontologist. He is, as of 2019, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at Museums Victoria. Education and career He was a student of Professor Ruben Arthur Stirton. This pushed him to become aware of potential in Australia to make fundamental discoveries about mammalian evolutionHe graduated in 1973 from Columbia University in New York City with a P.h.D. in Geology.
Go to Profile#3598
Jean-Bernard Caron
#74739
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jean-Bernard Caron is a French and Canadian palaeontologist currently working as a curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Caron is also cross-appointed at the University of Toronto as an associate professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Earth Sciences. He is known for his work on the Burgess Shale.
Go to Profile#3599
Gunnar Harling
#84463
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Gunnar Wilhelm Harling was a Swedish botanist. Harling did his doctorate at the University of Stockholm in 1951, was an assistant at the Bergius Botanic Garden from 1950 to 1952 and associate professor of botany at the University of Stockholm 1951–1963. From 1964 he was professor of botany at the University of Gothenburg, and in 1974 became a member of the Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#3600
John Kerr
#56588
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
John Foxton Ross Kerr is an Australian pathologist. He was the first to describe the ultrastructural changes in apoptosis, and could show that they differ significantly from the changes that occur in necrosis, another form of programmed cell death. For the first time, he placed the roles of cell death in normal adult mammals, and in disease, into scientific focus.
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