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,

#3701

Brent Mishler

#64652

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Brent D. Mishler is an American botanist who is director of the University and Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley as well as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, where he teaches phylogenetics, plant diversity, and island biology.

#3702

Nicola Spence

#55862

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Nicola Jane Spence is the Chief Plant Health Officer and Deputy Director for plant and bee health at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Early life and education Spence was educated at The Mount School, York and Bridlington School. She obtained a BSc in Botany from the University of Durham. Before starting her Masters, Spence volunteered at the Bermuda Marine Biology Research Institute then worked as a tutor for O level and A level students, and was unsure if she wanted to pursure a career in research. Spence undertook a Msc Microbiology from Birkbeck College, which she s...

#3703

Warren H. Wagner

#49765

Overall Influence

1920 - 2000 (80 years)

Warren Herbert Wagner Jr. was an eminent American botanist who was trained at Berkeley with E.B. Copeland and lived most of his professional career in Michigan. History Wagner was instructed in the ways of plant microphotograph and embryology by Marion S. Cave. Wagner was a longtime faculty member at the University of Michigan. He was most respected among his colleagues and students for his genius in discerning and articulating the differences in form between plant species in the context of their variation with environmental factors.

#3704

Reinhard L. Friede

#85701

Overall Influence

#3705

Roger Gosden

#61353

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Roger Gordon Gosden is a British-American physiologist in the field of female reproductive medicine. His scientific research focused on understanding the basic biology of development and senescence of ovaries in women, including mathematically modeling those processes. He did important translational research on ovarian tissue cryopreservation and transplantation.

#3706

Yury Verlinsky

#49634

Overall Influence

1943 - 2009 (66 years)

Yury Verlinsky was a Russian-American medical researcher specializing in embryonic and cellular genetics . He is best known as a pioneer in prenatal diagnosis for detecting genetic and chromosomal disorders six weeks earlier than standard amniocentesis. The founding father of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and embryo analysis prior to in-vitro fertilization , Verlinsky used his polar body biopsy technique to detect potential birth defects in offspring. It is now accepted worldwide as the standard for the most efficient and effective means of analyzing the chromosomal status of an embryo.

#3707

Walles T. Edmondson

#65685

Overall Influence

1916 - 2000 (84 years)

Walles Thomas Edmondson , also known as "Tommy" amongst his peers, was a prominent professor of zoology at the University of Washington. Edmondson was also leading American limnoecologist and writer, whose research focused on the causation and effects of eutrophication by plankton and his early work on rotifer taxonomy from Hispaniola, the Himalayas and lakes across the United States.

#3708

Dirk Schübeler

#83587

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Dirk Schübeler is a German researcher, Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research and professor at the University of Basel. He is an expert in gene regulation. Education and career Dirk Schübeler obtained his PhD from the Technical University in Braunschweig, Germany working in the Helmholtz Center for Infectious Research in the group of Jürgen Bode. He then did postdoctoral studies at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, USA, working with Mark Groudine. Schübeler joined the Friedrich Miescher Institute of Biomedical Research in 2003 as a junior g...

#3709

Stephen C. West

Stephen C. West

#70455

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Stephen Craig West FRS is a British biochemist and molecular biologist specialising in research on DNA recombination and repair. He is known for pioneering studies on genome instability diseases including cancer. West obtained his BSc in 1974, and his PhD in 1977, both from Newcastle University. He is currently a Principal Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He is an honorary Professor at University College London, and at Imperial College London. In recognition of his work he was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2007, is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Aca...

#3710

Irvin D. Yalom

#4821

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Irvin David Yalom is an American existential psychiatrist who is emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, as well as author of both fiction and nonfiction. Early life Yalom was born in Washington, D.C. About fifteen years prior to his birth in the United States, Yalom's Jewish parents emigrated from Russia and eventually opened a grocery store in Washington DC. Yalom spent much of his childhood reading books in the family home above the grocery store and in a local library. After graduating from high school, he attended George Washington University and then Boston University ...

#3711

Jonathan D. Cohen

#85784

Overall Influence

#3712

Glyn Lewis

#76014

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Glyn Lewis is a British professor of psychiatric epidemiology and the current head of the Division of Psychiatry at University College London Education Glyn Lewis was born in Wales. He studied at University College, Oxford, where he played saxophone with The Oxcentrics, a Dixieland jazz band. Lewis trained as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London and as an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He received his PhD from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.

#3713

Stephen H. White

#82887

Overall Influence

Stephen H. White is an American Biophysicist, academic, and author. He is a Professor Emeritus of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine. White has published over 350 papers, has been cited over 30,000 times, and has a Google Scholar H-index of 84. He has focused his research on structure and folding of membrane proteins, with particular attention on protein structure prediction, peptide–bilayer interactions, cell membrane biophysics, structure of membranes and lipid bilayers, and antimicrobial peptides. He was awarded the 2014 Carl Brändén Award for his contributions to the field of membrane protein folding.

#3714

James DiCarlo

#39665

Overall Influence

James Joseph DiCarlo is an American neuroscientist currently serving as the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biography DiCarlo received his BS in biomedical engineering at Northwestern University in 1990. He then attended the MD PhD program at Johns Hopkins University and graduated in 1998. After spending two years as a postdoctoral researcher in primate visual neurophysiology at Baylor College of Medicine, he joined the faculty at MIT in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department.

#3715

Reeve Maclaren Bailey

#66436

Overall Influence

1911 - 2011 (100 years)

Reeve Maclaren Bailey was an American ichthyologist. Bailey was awarded Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Michigan in 1938. Bailey was the president of the American Fisheries Society in 1974–1975.

#3716

Suzana Herculano-Houzel

Suzana Herculano-Houzel

#46290

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Suzana Herculano-Houzel is a Brazilian neuroscientist. Her main field of work is comparative neuroanatomy; her findings include a method of counting of neurons of human and other animals' brains and the relation between the cerebral cortex area and thickness and number of cortical folds .

#3717

Lewis Tilney

#80315

Overall Influence

Lewis G. Tilney is an American cell biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University Medical School in 1964. Tilney is known for studying the cytoskeleton of animal cells, specifically how different components affect the cytoskeleton's overall properties.

#3718

Carolyn Cohen

#43318

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Carolyn Cohen was an American biologist and biophysicist. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Early life and education Carolyn Cohen was born June 18th, 1929 to parents Anna and Philip Cohen. After Cohen's father died in 1939, she credited his lawyer Samuel Sumner Goldberg for mentoring her and nurturing her curiosity. Cohen attended Joan of Arc Junior High School, then the selective Hunter College High School. After rejections from McGill University and Barnard College, Cohen's French teacher urged her to apply to Bryn Mawr College, where she was accepted with a full-tuition scholarship.

#3719

Thomas Graf

#79576

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Thomas Graf is a biologist at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain. He is a pioneer in cell reprogramming, showing that blood cells can be transdifferentiated by transcription factors. He is also known for his early work on oncogenes carried by retroviruses and oncogene cooperation in leukemia formation.

#3720

Yechezkel (chezy) Barenholz

#85907

Overall Influence

#3721

Thomas N. Sato

#71798

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Thomas N. Sato is a prominent Japanese educator, entrepreneur, and biologist, whose research focuses on understanding molecular basis of cancer, cardiac disease and metabolic diseases by using a number of animal models including mice, zebrafish and fruit flies. He is also working to invent next-generation therapeutics for human diseases based on the stochastic basis of life and disease. He is currently director of the Thomas N. Sato BioMEC-X Laboratories at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, research director of the ERATO Sato Live Bio-forecasting pro...

#3722

Philip Hedrick

#72999

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Philip W. Hedrick is an American emeritus professor at Arizona State University . From 1992 until his retirement, Hedrick was Ullman Professor of Conservation Biology at ASU. Hedrick has published over 200 articles on the topics of population genetics and conservation biology. Among other organisms, he has published extensively on wolves and bighorn sheep.

#3723

Michael Skinner

#65550

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Michael Kirtland Skinner is a U.S. biologist specializing in reproductive biology and epigenetics. Skinner was born in Redmond, Oregon to Hugh Kirtland Skinner and Tonya Valorie Skinner Wolf. He obtained A.S. at Warner Pacific College in Portland in 1977, B.A. in chemistry at Reed College, Portland, in 1979, Ph.D. in biochemistry at Washington State University in 1982, and post-doc at the University of Toronto until 1984. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Environmental Epigenetics published by Oxford University Press.

#3724

John-Dylan Haynes

John-Dylan Haynes

#54689

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

John-Dylan Haynes is a British-German brain researcher. Haynes studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Bremen from 1992 to 1997. In 2003 he received his doctorate from the Institute of Biology in Bremen. After research stays in Magdeburg, Plymouth and London he became head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Neurosciences in Leipzig in 2005.

#3725

George Stark

#78533

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

George Stark is an American chemist and biochemist. His research interests include protein and enzyme function and modification, interferons and cytokines, signal transduction, and gene expression. Personal life George Stark was born in New York City in 1933. His father, Jack Stark, was a restaurant owner, and his mother, Florence Stark, was a bookkeeper. He was the youngest of three children, with two older sisters, Edna and Bernyce.

#3726

Wolfram Bode

#68007

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Wolfram Bode is a German biochemist. Biography Born in Berlin, Bode was educated in chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Göttingen, the University of Tübingen and the University of Munich as a fellow of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1971 at the University of Munich for studies of the bacterial flagellum. Since 1972 he is working at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried. Bode is associate professor at the University of Munich.

#3727

Hiroo Ed. Imura

#86008

Overall Influence

#3728

Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler

#47088

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler is a German geneticist and developmental biologist. The focus of her research group is the development of embryonic tissues and the nervous system. The model organism for her investigations is the mouse.

#3729

Louis Legendre

#65139

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Louis Legendre is a Canadian-trained oceanographer whose later career took him to France. Education Legendre degreed in liberal arts and sciences at the University of Montreal in 1964 and 1967, respectively. He degreed in oceanography at Dalhousie University in 1971.

#3730

William J. Jagust

#86059

Overall Influence

#3731

José Cuatrecasas

José Cuatrecasas

#76671

Overall Influence

1903 - 1996 (93 years)

José Cuatrecasas was a Spanish botanist. He was born on March 19, 1903, in Camprodon, Catalonia, Spain. His research focused on the high-elevation páramo and sub-páramo regions of the Andes Mountains in South America, especially the flowering plant families Asteraceae and Malpighiaceae. He played an important role in the founding of the Organization for Flora Neotropica.

#3732

Evan E. Eichler

Evan E. Eichler

#66898

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Evan E. Eichler is an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute studying human genome evolution, genome variation and their role in diseases. He is also a Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle.

#3733

Gary Harold Glover

#86099

Overall Influence

#3734

N. Edward Tolbert

#86103

Overall Influence

#3735

Ottavio Pompeiano

#86113

Overall Influence

#3736

Barbara Migeon

#51102

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

Barbara Ruben Migeon is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Institute of Genetic Medicine. She founded the Johns Hopkins program in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology. Migeon is the author of Females are Mosaics: X inactivation and sex differences in disease. She was awarded the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics Dimes/Colonel Harland D. Sanders Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.

#3737

Mitsuru Hotta

#74361

Overall Influence

1935 - 2015 (80 years)

was a Japanese botanist best known for his research on Araceae. Hotta was born in Osaka, Japan in 1935. He graduated from the Agricultural Department of Osaka Prefecture University in 1960. The same year, he took part in the Tonga and Fiji Expedition organised by Kyoto University. Between 1963 and 1964, Hotta made numerous plant collections in Borneo together with Professor Minoru Hirano of Osaka City University.

#3738

Carl F. Jordan

#58968

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Carl F. Jordan is Professor Emeritus, Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia. Education Jordan graduated with a B.Sc. from the University of Michigan in 1958. In 1962, he enrolled in graduate school at Rutgers University and received his M.Sc. in Plant Ecology in 1964. He acquired his Ph.D. in 1966.

#3739

Anthony David Bradshaw

#86155

Overall Influence

#3740

Claude E. Boyd

#86161

Overall Influence

#3741

Robert W. Allard

#75869

Overall Influence

1919 - 2003 (84 years)

Robert Wayne Allard was an American plant breeder and plant population geneticist who is widely regarded as one of the leading plant population geneticists of the 20th century. Allard became chair of the genetics department at University of California, Davis in 1967; he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, and was awarded the DeKalb-Pfizer Distinguished Career Award and the Crop Science Science of America Award. He was honored as the Nilsson-Ehle Lecturer of the Mendelian Society of Sweden and as the Wilhelmine Key lecturer of the American Genetic Association. He also se...

#3742

Kenneth H. Wolfe

Kenneth H. Wolfe

#74138

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Kenneth Henry Wolfe is an Irish geneticist and professor of genomic evolution at University College Dublin , Ireland. Education Wolfe was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he was awarded Bachelor of Arts degree in genetics in 1986 followed by a PhD in 1990 for research investigating synonymous substitution in vascular plants and mammals supervised by Paul M. Sharp.

#3743

John Gabrieli

#71855

Overall Influence

John Gabrieli is a neuroscientist at MIT, and an Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a faculty member in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center, part of the McGovern Institute. Gabrieli is an expert on the brain mechanisms of human cognition, including memory, thought and emotion. His work includes neuroimaging studies on healthy adults and children as well as clinical patients with many different brain disorders, including schizophre...

#3744

Ellen Ketterson

#27856

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Ellen D. Ketterson is an American evolutionary biologist, behavioral ecologist, neuroendocrinologist and ornithologist best known for her experimental approach to the study of life-history trade-offs in a songbird, the Dark-eyed Junco. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biology, Director of the Environmental Resilience Institute, and affiliate professor in Cognitive Science, Gender Studies, Integrative Study of Animal Behavior, and Neuroscience at Indiana University.

#3745

R. Paul Robertson

#78077

Overall Influence

R. Paul Robertson is an American endocrinologist and former president and scientific director of the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute . He is a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Robertson was the 2009 president, Medicine & Science of the Volunteer Board for the American Diabetes Association. His research interests focus on glucose regulation of pancreatic islet gene expression and the abnormal consequences on gene expression caused by glucose toxicity. He is also involved in metabolic studies of type 1 diabetic patients who have successfully received pancreas and pancreatic islet transplantation .

#3746

Mohamed Kassas

#47469

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Dr. Mohamed Abdel Fattah Al-Kassas was an Egyptian botanist and conservationist. He was professor emeritus for Botany at the University of Cairo and a specialist in Arid land Ecology. He studied at the University of Cairo, where he received a B.Sc. in 1944 and a M.Sc. in 1947, and at the University of Cambridge . A specialist in the ecology of desert plants, and was among the first to publish on the topic of desertification. Kassas was an advisory member of the United Nations Environment Programme from its beginning, and from 1978 to 1984 president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature .

#3747

Claude Desplan

#69666

Overall Influence

Claude Desplan, a biologist originally trained in France, has been a Silver Professor in New York University’s Department of Biology since 1999. His research centers on understanding the development and functioning of the visual system that underlies color vision using the fruit fly Drosophila as a model organism.

#3748

Anne Peyroche

#27050

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Anne Peyroche, born Anne Marthe Alice Smal, is a French biologist and geneticist. From October 2017 to January 2018, she acted as interim president of the National Center for Scientific Research until fraud allegations were made.

#3749

Anurag Agrawal

#57122

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Anurag Agrawal is an American professor of ecology, evolutionary biology, and entomology who has written over a 150 peer-reviewed articles, which earned him an h-index of 92. He is the author of a popular science book, Monarchs and Milkweeds from Princeton University Press, and is currently the James Alfred Perkins Professor of Environmental Studies at Cornell University.

#3750

Marie Maynard Daly

Marie Maynard Daly

#19850

Overall Influence

1921 - 2003 (82 years)

Marie Maynard Daly was an American biochemist. She was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Columbia University and the first African-American woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. Daly made important contributions in four areas of research: the chemistry of histones, protein synthesis, the relationships between cholesterol and hypertension, and creatine's uptake by muscle cells.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions