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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#3601

Erwin w. Gelfand

#84486

Overall Influence

#3602

Zeba Islam Seraj

Zeba Islam Seraj

#71561

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Zeba Islam Seraj is a Bangladeshi scientist known for her research in developing salt-tolerant rice varieties suitable for growth in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. She is currently a professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Dhaka.

#3603

Andrea Baccarelli

#43185

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Andrea Baccarelli is an Italian American epigeneticist and clinical endocrinologist, best known for his academic contributions in the field of epigenetics, mitochondriomics, and computational epigenomics, with a research focus on investigating the impact of environmental exposures on human health. He serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

#3604

Nicholas Kester Tonks

#84493

Overall Influence

Nicholas Kester Tonks FRS is a professor in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. His research is mainly focused on studying the function and regulation of protein tyrosine phosphatases. He did his undergraduate in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford. After graduation, he joined Sir Philip Cohen lab in University of Dundee for his PhD study in protein phosphatase from 1982-1985.

#3605

Thomas Carell

#30127

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Thomas Carell is a German biochemist. Carell was born in 1966 in Herford Germany, he studied chemistry from 1985 till 1990 at the University of Münster finishing with a diploma thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research Heidelberg. After his PhD thesis on Porphyrin chemistry at the same institute, he did his postdoctoral at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. He finished his habilitation on DNA repair proteins at the Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule Zürich in 1998. From 2000 till 2004 he was Professor for organic chemistry at the University of Marburg until he became Professor for organic chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#3606

Dan Tawfik

#43552

Overall Influence

1955 - 2021 (66 years)

Dan Salah Tawfik was an Israeli biochemist, best known for his contributions in protein engineering, evolutionary biochemistry and, more particularly, enzyme evolution. Biography Tawfik was born in Jerusalem to a family of Jewish immigrants originally from Iraq. He received his BSc in chemistry and biochemistry and MSc in biotechnology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science . He then moved to the United Kingdom where, after two years of postdoctoral research working under Alan Fersht at the University of Cambridge and at the Medical Rese...

#3607

Isaäc J. H. Isbrücker

#71606

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Isaäc Jan Hendrik Isbrücker is a retired Dutch ichthyologist who specialised in the scientific classification of South American catfish . Life and work Between 1960 and 1985 Isbrücker was a keeper of the aquarium in the Amsterdam Zoo. He then became responsible for fish collection of the Zoological Museum in Amsterdam, which was transferred to the Naturalis Centre in Leiden in 2011. Between 1969 and 2006 Isbrücker appeared of author or co-author of more than 80 publications, in which he described roughly a dozen new fish species, including the genus Hypancistrus. His work focuses on the taxon...

#3608

Karl E. Rickels

#84518

Overall Influence

#3609

Evan R. Simpson

#84534

Overall Influence

#3610

Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Dirk Schulze-Makuch

#35611

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a professor at the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Technical University Berlin, Germany and Adjunct Professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences Washington State University, Pullman, WA. He is best known for his publications on extraterrestrial life, being coauthor of five books on the topic: The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds , A One Way Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet , We Are Not Alone: Why We Have Already Found Extraterrestrial Life , Cosmic Biology: How Life could Evolve on Other Worlds , and Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints .

#3611

Karel Svoboda

#67438

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Karel Svoboda is a neuroscientist. His research focuses on the question of how the neural circuits of the brain produce behavior. He has also performed notable work in molecular biophysics, neurotechnology, and neuroplasticity, particularly changes in the brain due to experience and learning. In 2021, he became the Vice President and Executive Director of the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics.

#3612

Dennis Kasper

#77531

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Dennis L. Kasper is an American microbiologist and immunologist, and the William Ellery Channing Professor of Medicine and Professor of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. He leads the Kasper Laboratory within the Blavatnik Institute in the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. He was also executive dean for academic programs at Harvard Medical School and director of the Channing Laboratory Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

#3613

Enrico Fazzini

#26954

Overall Influence

Enrico Fazzini is an American neurologist. He is considered an expert on Parkinson's disease and has published numerous research publications on the subject. He has been involved in a number of clinical trials for new pharmaceutical treatments for Parkinson's disease. He attended the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa. He is board certified in neurology by both the M.D. and D.O. medical boards. He began his practice in 1989. Dr. Enrico Fazzini completed his neurology training at Boston University in 1987 and his fellowship in Movement Disorders at Columbia Presbyterian in 1989.

#3614

Günter Altner

#42222

Overall Influence

1936 - 2011 (75 years)

Günter Altner was a German interdisciplanarily active scientist, biologist, Protestant theologian, ecologist, environmentalist, writer and lecturer. Altner had briefly been a professor of human biology at the University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd, subsequently focussed on theology, his second area of education, and was a professor of protestant theology at the University of Koblenz and Landau for 22 years.

#3615

M. Daniel Lane

#81643

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Malcolm Daniel Lane was a biochemist who spent most of his career on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Lane served as the head of the Department of Biological Chemistry from 1978 to 1997, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1987, and was named a University Distinguished Service Professor – the institution's highest academic title – in 2001. Lane's research focused on the biochemistry of lipids and lipid metabolism, and the resulting physiological mechanisms regulating adipogenesis and obesity.

#3616

Jamey Marth

#67381

Overall Influence

Jamey Marth is a molecular and cellular biologist. He is currently on the faculty of the SBP Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, California where he is Director of the Immunity and Pathogenesis program.

#3617

Jeffrey Skolnick

#74683

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jeffrey Skolnick is an American computational biologist. He is currently a Georgia Institute of Technology School of Biology Professor, the Director of the Center for the Study of Systems Biology, the Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair, the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology, the Director of the Integrative BioSystems Institute, and was previously the Scientific Advisor at Intellimedix.

#3618

Richard E. Blackwelder

#75870

Overall Influence

1909 - 2001 (92 years)

Richard Eliot Blackwelder was an American biologist, professor and author specializing in entomology and taxonomy. After a distinguished professional career, he retired in 1977, and in 1978 he discovered the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, which were to be the focus of his energies for the remainder of his life. Over the next twenty years, Blackwelder amassed a large collection of Tolkien-related books and other materials, which he sorted and indexed. The Blackwelder Collection, donated to Marquette University in 1982, is believed to be the largest single body of secondary sources on Tolkien ev...

#3619

Gustavo Deco

#43943

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Gustavo Deco is an Argentinian and Italian professor and scientist. He serves as Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and Full Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University, where he is Director of the Center of Brain and Cognition and head of the Computational Neuroscience Group. In 2001 Deco was awarded the international prize of Siemens "Inventor of the Year" for his contributions in statistical learning, models of visual perception, and fMRI based diagnosis of neuropsychiatric diseases..

#3620

Les Kaufman

#52149

Overall Influence

Les Kaufman is an evolutionary ecologist specializing in the biology and conservation of aquatic ecosystems. He has special expertise in coral reef biology, the evolution and ecology of tropical great lakes fishes, and ecosystem-based management of marine resources.

#3621

Nathalie Le Bot

#56137

Overall Influence

Nathalie Le Bot is a French biologist and the chief life sciences editor of Nature Communications. Education She is a graduate of École normale supérieure having studied molecular and cell biology before joining the European Molecular Biology Laboratory graduate program in 1995.

#3622

Günther Osche

#66562

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Günther Osche was a German evolutionary biologist, ecologist and parasitologist. He started his career with a research on nematodes having Hans-Jürgen Stammer as his scientific supervisor. He is known to have raised the name Rhabditides elegans in the subgenus Caenorhabditis in 1952 in the history of the naming of the model worm Caenorhabditis elegans.

#3623

Michael Stoker

#52694

Overall Influence

1918 - 2013 (95 years)

Sir Michael George Parke Stoker CBE FRS FRSE MD FRCP was a British physician and medical researcher in virology. Scientific career Stoker studied medicine at Clare College, Cambridge and St Thomas' Hospital in London, gaining his MD in 1947, after serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II. On return to civilian life he became a Fellow of Clare College from 1948 and an assistant tutor and director of medical studies from 1949 to 1958. Between 1953 and 1956, he researched the structure of Coxiella burnetii, the bacteria causing Q fever, with Paul Fiset.

#3624

Joseph T. Gregory

#79923

Overall Influence

1914 - 2007 (93 years)

Dr. Joseph Tracy Gregory was an American paleontologist and professor. Joseph Tracy Gregory was born in Eureka, California, the only child of Frank Gregory, a civil engineer, and Edith Tracy, a high school teacher. He grew up in Berkeley, California and continued with his college education there, graduating from the University of California with an A.B. in 1935, and receiving his doctorate in 1938. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the Army Air Forces in the weather service.

#3625

Frank Verhulst

#82635

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Frank Cornelis Verhulst is a Dutch psychiatrist and epidemiologist who is a research professor at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark. His research focuses mainly on child psychopathology and psychiatric epidemiology.

#3626

Gary Felsenfeld

#84666

Overall Influence

#3627

Denis Wirtz

#25564

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Denis Wirtz is the vice provost for research and Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Engineering Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is an expert in the molecular and biophysical mechanisms of cell motility and adhesion and nuclear dynamics in health and disease.

#3628

Jerard Hurwitz

#84686

Overall Influence

#3629

Leslie Leinwand

#81380

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Leslie Leinwand is an American biologist and serial entrepreneur who works on the genetics and molecular physiology of inherited diseases of the heart, and on how gender and diet modify the heart. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and the Chief Scientific Officer of the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.

#3630

Mike Bate

#74488

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Christopher Michael Bate, FRS is an Emeritus Professor of developmental biology at the Department of Zoology and fellow at King's College, Cambridge. The son of John Gordon Bate, M.B. Ch.B., an R.A.F. doctor, of Holmbury St Mary, Dorking, his paternal grandfather was Herbert Bate, Dean of York 1932–41. His mother, Rachel Denise, was daughter of Samuel Ronald Courthope Bosanquet, KC, recorder of Walsall, Chancellor of the Diocese of Hertford; a great-uncle on the maternal side, William Temple, was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944.

#3631

Guy Goodwin

#37087

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Guy Goodwin is a senior research fellow and until recently was the W.A. Handley Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford . A fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Goodwin has served as principal investigator in many clinical trials for the treatment of bipolar disorder. He is also an Emeritus Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health and Care Research and has been on the advisory boards of numerous research councils. He was President of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology from 2013 to 2016.

#3632

Mary Hagedorn

#84776

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Mary Margaret Hagedorn is a US marine biologist specialised in physiology who has developed a conservation program for coral species, using the principles of cryobiology, the study of cellular systems under cold conditions, and cryopreservation, the freezing of sperm and embryos.

#3633

Bruce Stocker

#72775

Overall Influence

1917 - 2004 (87 years)

Bruce Arnold Dunbar Stocker was an English-born academic. He was Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University from 1966 to 1987. Early life and family Born in Hambledon, Surrey, England, on 26 May 1917, Stocker was the son of Eustace Dupuis Henchman Stocker and Ruth Mary Richmond Stocker . Eustace Stocker was a military officer who won the Military Cross in World War I, and was appointed an Officer and then Commander of the Order of the British Empire during World War II. Ruth Stocker was the daughter of Richmond Hursthouse, a Member of Parliament and cabinet minister in New Zealand.

#3634

Gregory Lipoxen Te Gregoriadis

#84829

Overall Influence

#3635

Judy Illes

#36773

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Judy Illes, , PHD, FRSC, FCAHS, is Professor of Neurology and Distinguished University Scholar in Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. She is Director of Neuroethics Canada at UBC, and faculty in the Brain Research Centre at UBC and at the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute. She also holds affiliate appointments in the School of Population and Public Health and the School of Journalism at UBC, and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. USA. She was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2017.

#3636

Yves Clermont

#84856

Overall Influence

#3637

Louise Vet

#65844

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Louise Elisabeth Maria Vet is a Dutch biologist and emeritus professor of ecology at Wageningen University. In addition to her scientific career, she focuses on increasing environmental awareness among the general public and promoting environmentally friendly initiatives.

#3638

Nancy Pedersen

#66437

Overall Influence

Nancy L. Pedersen is an American genetic epidemiologist. She is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and the leader of the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. She is known for her research on human twins, much of which is based on the Swedish Twin Registry. This has included research on the genetic basis of Alzheimer's disease and self-confidence.

#3639

Daniele Piomelli

#70935

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Daniele Piomelli is an Italian-born American scientist. He studied neuroscience in New York City, with James H. Schwartz and Eric R. Kandel at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and later with Paul Greengard at the Rockefeller University . Two of his mentors received in 2000 the Nobel Prize for their contributions to medicine. After working at the INSERM in Paris and at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla with Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman, he joined the University of California Irvine School of Medicine, where he is now Louise Turner Arnold Chair in Neurosciences and Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry.

#3640

William Drohan

#63093

Overall Influence

1946 - 2007 (61 years)

William N. Drohan was an American microbiologist and academic known for his research in the field of hematology. Education Drohan earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in bacteriology from the University of California, Los Angeles and a PhD in medical microbiology and immunology from UCLA School of Medicine.

#3641

Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker

#46115

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker is a German geneticist, biochemist and research manager. His main fields of research are virus/cell interaction, the mechanisms of gene expression in higher cells and prion diseases. He was President of the German Research Foundation and Secretary General of the European Research Council and is Secretary General of the Human Frontier Science Program Organization.

#3642

Paul Müller

#73736

Overall Influence

1940 - 2010 (70 years)

Paul Müller was a German professor of biology at the University of Trier. He was born in Gersweiler and died in Saarland. The focus of his work was biogeography, in particular in the Neotropics. His Ph.D. work was on birds and other vertebrates of the Ilha de São Sebastião . Subsequently, his studies focussed on herpetofauna, tropical ecology and sustainability of hunting.

#3643

Giancarlo Comi

#84915

Overall Influence

#3644

Ralph Kekwick

#44599

Overall Influence

1908 - 2000 (92 years)

Professor Ralph Ambrose Kekwick . was a British biochemist who did pioneering work on human plasma fractionation, including the first production of Factor VIII. Early life and education Ralph's father was Oliver A. Kekwick a managing clerk in a firm of ships' chandlers in Royal Albert Dock, London. His mother was Mary E. Price who, aged 13, was a pupil-teacher at Bromley St Leonard's Church school, Bromley-by-Bow, London. Ralph was the youngest of her three children.

#3645

Sanjay Asthana

#32544

Overall Influence

Sanjay Asthana is Chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and holds the Duncan G. and Lottie H. Ballantine Endowed Chair in Geriatrics. Since 2009, Asthana has also served as Director of the Wisconsin Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.

#3646

Gertrude Henle

#84936

Overall Influence

#3647

Pablo Rudomín Zevnovaty

#31577

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Pablo Rudomin Zevnovaty is a Mexican-Russian biologist, physiologist, and neuroscientist. He is regarded as one of the most prestigious neurophysiologists in the international community. His studies have been fundamentally directed to the analysis of mechanisms of the central control of the information transmitted by the sensory fibers in the spinal cord, and of how these are modified during central and peripheral injuries, as well as during processes of acute inflammation.

#3648

Eberhard Voit

#36441

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Eberhard O. Voit is a Professor and David D. Flanagan Chair in Biological Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He leads the Laboratory for Biological Systems Analysis.

#3649

John G. Gunderson

#14640

Overall Influence

1942 - 2019 (77 years)

John Gunder Gunderson was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a director at the Borderline center at McLean Hospital. Education, residencies and fellowships Born in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, Gunderson graduated from Johns Hopkins College in 1963, received his MBS from Dartmouth Medical School in 1965 and his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1967. Between 1967 and 1971, he was an Intern in Medicine at Hennepin County General Hospital, Resident in Psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and Chief Resident in Psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Between 1971 ...

#3650

Jack Dixon

#83713

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Jack Dixon is the Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, Cellular & Molecular Medicine, Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. Early life and education Dixon was born in 1943. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned a PhD in 1971. He also studied at UC Los Angeles and UC San Diego.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions