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

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#3751

Geraldine Wright

#75077

Overall Influence

Geraldine Wright is an insect neuroethologist in the United Kingdom. In 2018 she became the Professor of Comparative Physiology/Organismal Biology at the University of Oxford and in 2021 she was appointed Hope Professor of Zoology.

#3752

Gabriele Berg

#68025

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Gabriele Berg is a biologist, biotechnologist and university lecturer in Environmental and Ecological Technology at the Technical University of Graz. Her research emphasis is on the development of sustainable methods of plant vitalisation with Bioeffectors and molecular analysis of microbial processes in the soil, particularly in the Rhizosphere.

#3753

J. Silvio Gutkind

#86257

Overall Influence

#3754

Heinrich Reichert

#69764

Overall Influence

1949 - 2019 (70 years)

Heinrich Reichert was a Swiss developmental and neurobiologist at the Biozentrum University of Basel. Life Heinrich Reichert studied physics, chemistry and biology at the University of Karlsruhe. After graduating with a doctorate in the field of genetics from the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 1979 he went to Stanford University, in California. In 1982 Reichert moved to the Zoological Institute at the University of Basel and between 1986 and 1991 he was a faculty member at the University of Geneva before returning to the University of Basel. Reichert remained as a professor at the Zoolog...

#3755

Avraham Fahn

#71449

Overall Influence

1916 - 2012 (96 years)

Avraham Fahn was an Israeli professor of botany at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Avraham Fahn was born in Vienna, Austria. He emigrated to Mandate Palestine and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, receiving a PhD in 1948.

#3756

J. Bart Classen

#38351

Overall Influence

John Barthelow Classen is an American immunologist and anti-vaccinationist. He received his M.D. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore in 1988, his M.B.A. from Columbia University in 1992 and obtained his medical license in October 1997. He is best known for publishing research concluding that vaccines, in particular the Hib vaccine, cause insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, a hypothesis he proposed based on experiments he conducted on mice in 1996. His views are disputed and considered unverified.

#3757

Lisa Steiner

#65706

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Lisa Steiner is a professor of immunology in the department of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When she arrived at MIT in 1967, she was the first woman faculty member in the department. Her research focuses on the evolution and development of the immune system, using zebrafish as a model organism.

#3758

Anthony Dickenson

Anthony Dickenson

#74566

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Anthony Dickenson, FMedSci is Professor of Neuropharmacology at University College, London. Education Tony Dickenson received his PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research, London, and has held Fellowships and posts in Paris, California and Sweden.

#3759

Avishag Zahavi

#72958

Overall Influence

1922 - 2021 (99 years)

Avishag Kadman-Zahavi was an Israeli professor emeritus of Plant Physiology at The Volcani Center for Agricultural Research, Bet-Dagan, Israel. She is best known for her close collaboration with her husband Amotz Zahavi, who developed together with her the so-called Handicap principle, a sociobiological approach to the theory of natural selection.

#3760

Christina Agapakis

Christina Agapakis

#61833

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Christina Maria Agapakis is a synthetic biologist, science writer. She is the Creative Director of the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks. Education and early life Agapakis received her Bachelor of Science degree in 2006 from Yale University in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. She then attended Harvard University, where she received her PhD in biological and biomedical sciences under the mentorship of Pamela Silver. Her thesis, on Biological Design Principles for Synthetic Biology, centered on identifying and utilizing design principles for bioengineering, keeping in mind the...

#3761

Dinesh Bhugra

#34997

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Dinesh Kumar Makhan Lal Bhugra is a professor of mental health and diversity at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. He is an honorary consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and is former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He has been president of the World Psychiatric Association and the President Elect of the British Medical Association.

#3762

Susanne Renner

#80580

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Susanne Sabine Renner is a German botanist. Until October 2020, she was a professor of biology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as well as director of the Botanische Staatssammlung München and the Botanischer Garten München-Nymphenburg. Since January 2021, she lives in Saint Louis, where she is an Honorary Professor of Biology at Washington University and a Research Associate at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

#3763

Vicki Sato

#67762

Overall Influence

Vicki L. Sato is a retired professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and a professor of the practice in the department of molecular and cell biology at Harvard University. Since 2021, she has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .

#3764

Jon Fjeldså

#75818

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Jon Fjeldså is a Norwegian-born Danish ornithologist and bird artist. Fjeldså has authored several books and published numerous research papers, primarily focusing on grebes, birds of the Andes and Eastern Arc Mountains, and evolution of passerines. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Copenhagen.

#3765

Harry Victor Gelboin

#86481

Overall Influence

#3766

Marek Konarzewski

#46101

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Marek Konarzewski – professor of biology, popular-science author, faculty member at the University of Białystok, and corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since October 2022, President-Elect of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

#3767

Peter Prof Dr Gruss

#86501

Overall Influence

#3768

William Toby White

#51155

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

William Toby White is an Australian ichthyologist. He studies speciation and biodiversity of shark, ray, and skate species through morphological and molecular systematics. Education White received bachelor's and doctoral degrees in Biological Science from Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. His doctoral thesis, "Aspects of the biology of elasmobranchs in a subtropical embayment in Western Australia and of chondrichthyan fisheries in Indonesia", examined 1off the western coast of Australia

#3769

Uwe Heinemann

#80501

Overall Influence

1944 - 2016 (72 years)

Uwe Heinemann was a German neuroscientist. He was born on 17 February 1944 in Genthin. Heinemann completed his doctorate advised by Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt, and pursued postdoctoral research with . From 1981 to 1986, Heinemann's research was funded via a Heisenberg fellowship awarded by the German Research Council. He began teaching at the University of Cologne in 1986, and joined the Charité faculty in 1993, where he taught until 2012. Heinemann subsequently took a senior professorship at the Neuroscience Research Center.

#3770

Lily Young

#51547

Overall Influence

Lily Young is a distinguished professor of environmental microbiology at Rutgers New Brunswick. She is also a member of the administrative council at Rutgers University. She is the provost of Rutgers New Brunswick. She is a member of the Biotechnology Center for Agriculture and the Environment and has her academic appointment in the Department of Environmental Sciences.

#3771

Dawn Wright

#43557

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Dawn Jeannine Wright is an American geographer and oceanographer. She is a leading authority in the application of geographic information system technology to the field of ocean and coastal science, and played a key role in creating the first GIS data model for the oceans. Wright is Chief Scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute . She has also been a professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University since 1995 and is a former Oregon Professor of the Year as named by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

#3772

Didier Stainier

Didier Stainier

#83668

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Didier Stainier is a Belgian/American developmental geneticist who is currently a director at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Scientific career Didier Stainier studied biology in Wales , Belgium and the USA where he got a BA in 1984. He has a PhD in biochemistry and biophysics from Harvard University . During his PhD work, he investigated axon guidance and target recognition in the developing mouse with Walter Gilbert. Subsequently, he initiated the studies on zebrafish cardiac development as a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow with Mark F...

#3773

Peter H. Krammer

Peter H. Krammer

#86542

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Peter Heinrich Krammer is a German immunologist and one of the directors of The National Center for Tumor Diseases , as well as the head of the Division Immunogenetics at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Peter H. Krammer is well known for his research and findings in apoptosis. He and his lab members discovered the CD95 receptor and many other molecules involved in signaling through the CD95 receptor.

#3774

Elliott D. Kieff

#82638

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Elliott D. Kieff is an American physician who is the emeritus Harriett Ryan Albee Professor of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He had previously served as Chair of the Virology Program at Harvard Medical School from 1991 to 2004.

#3775

Bernard M. Babior

#86577

Overall Influence

#3776

Samuel Shuster

#86593

Overall Influence

#3777

Patrick Sung

#63133

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Patrick Sung is an American professor of structural biology and biochemistry at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He is known for his work on DNA repair. Biography Sung was born on May 24, 1959, in Hong Kong. In 1981, he got his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Liverpool and four years later got his Ph.D. from Oxford University. From 1993 to 1997 he was an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch and from that year till 2001 served as an associate professor of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio where he...

#3778

Amy Wagers

#61131

Overall Influence

Amy J. Wagers is the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, an investigator in islet cell and regenerative biology at the Joslin Diabetes Center, and principal faculty of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. She is co-chair of the Department of Stem Cells and Regenerative Biology at Harvard Medical School.

#3779

Paul W. Sternberg

#83226

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Paul W. Sternberg is an American biologist. He does research for WormBase on C. elegans, a model organism. Early life and education Paul Sternberg grew up in Long Island, New York. He attended Hampshire College for undergrad in Amherst, Massachusetts where he got a B.A. in 1978. After that he went to MIT where he received his PhD in Biology for work on nematode development with Robert Horvitz. He went on to do postdoctoral research with Ira Herskowitz in yeast molecular development at the University of California San Francisco. He is currently working at the California Institute of Technology ...

#3780

David J. Hunter

#86646

Overall Influence

#3781

Maurizio Brunori

#86651

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

#3782

Karim Nayernia

#52035

Overall Influence

Karim Nayernia is an Iranian biomedical scientist and a world expert on stem cell biology and Personalized medicine. He carried out pioneering work that has the potential to lead to future therapies for a range of medical conditions such as heart disease, Parkinson's disease and male infertility. His team was the first in the world to isolate a new type of stem cell from adult mouse testes , called spermatagonial stem cells. It was able to show that some of these stem cells, called multipotent adult germline stem cells , turned into heart, muscle, brain and other cells. Prof Nayernia and his team proposed that similar cells could be extracted from men using a simple testicular biopsy.

#3783

Muin J. Khoury

#61144

Overall Influence

Muin Joseph Khoury is an American geneticist and epidemiologist who conducts research in the field of public health genomics. He is the founding director of the Office of Public Health Genomics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 1997. He has also been a senior advisor in public health genomics at the National Cancer Institute since 2007.

#3784

Jeffrey Bennetzen

#71288

Overall Influence

Jeffrey Lynn Bennetzen is an American geneticist on the faculty of the University of Georgia . Bennetzen is known for his work describing codon usage bias in yeast, being the first to clone and sequence an active transposon in maize, and developing and proposing along with Michael Freeling the model of the grasses as a single genetic system. He is one of two authors, with Sarah Hake of the book "Handbook of Maize." Bennetzen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

#3785

Peter C. Burger

#86677

Overall Influence

#3786

Earl K. Miller

#73529

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Earl Keith Miller is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on neural mechanisms of cognitive, or executive, control. Earl K. Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience with the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of SplitSage.

#3787

Howard Dalton

#44798

Overall Influence

1944 - 2008 (64 years)

Sir Howard Dalton, FRS was a British microbiologist. He served as the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from March 2002 to September 2007. Education Born in New Malden, Dalton was educated at Raynes Park County Grammar School and Queen Elizabeth College, University of London . He graduated in 1965 and went on to study at the University of Sussex with John Postgate, obtaining his PhD in 1968.

#3788

Helmut Kettenmann

#86727

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

#3789

John Mekalanos

#84399

Overall Influence

John Mekalanos is a microbiologist who is primarily known for leading one of the first teams that reported the discovery of the type VI secretion system as well as his work on the pathogenicity of the bacterial species Vibrio cholerae, its toxin, and its secretion systems. Since 1998, he has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

#3790

Winifred Curtis

#63776

Overall Influence

1905 - 2005 (100 years)

Winifred Mary Curtis was a British-born Australian botanist, author and a pioneer researcher in plant embryology and cytology who played a prominent role in the department of botany at the University of Tasmania , where the main plant science laboratory is named in her honour.

#3791

Mark Alwin Clements

#77879

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Mark Alwin Clements is an Australian botanist and orchidologist. He obtained his doctorate at the Australian National University defending his thesis entitled Reproductive Biology in relation to phylogeny of the Orchidaceae, especially the tribe Diurideae.

#3792

Nigel R. Franks

#39211

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Nigel R. Franks is an English emeritus professor of Animal Behaviour and Ecology at the University of Bristol. He obtained a BSc and PhD in biology at the University of Leeds. After receiving his BSc in 1977 he began his PhD, during which he spent two years doing field work in Panama on army ants with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He was awarded the Thomas Henry Huxley Award in 1980 from the Zoological Society of London for the best British PhD in Zoology. He then received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851 allowing him to undertake postdoctoral work under Edward O.

#3793

John B. Little

#61348

Overall Influence

John B. Little was an American radiobiologist who was the James Stevens Simmons Professor of Radiobiology Emeritus at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health from 2006 until his death in 2020. He graduated from Harvard College and Boston University Medical School .

#3794

Anne Cooke

#79556

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Anne Cooke, is a British biologist and academic, specialising in immunology and autoimmune diseases. From 2000 to 2013, she was Professor of Immunobiology at the University of Cambridge. She was a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, between 1992 and 2013.

#3795

Michael Francis Fay

#85267

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Michael Francis Fay is a British geneticist and botanist currently serving as Senior Research Leader, Conservation Genetics, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Life After studying at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, Fay was awarded a PhD in 1989, having started working at Kew in 1986. In 2000, he was awarded the Bicentenary Medal of the Linnean Society, and has served on its governing council for several terms since 2003. He is currently Chair of the Orchid Specialist Group of the Species Survival Commission of IUCN. He serves as chief editor of the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.

#3796

Kay Behrensmeyer

Kay Behrensmeyer

#59112

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Anna Katherine "Kay" Behrensmeyer is an American taphonomist and paleoecologist. She is a pioneer in the study of the fossil records of terrestrial ecosystems and engages in geological and paleontological field research into the ecological context of human evolution in East Africa. She is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History . At the museum, she is co-director of the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems program and an associate of the Human Origins Program.

#3797

D. John Faulkner

#86811

Overall Influence

#3798

Jill Mikucki

#27405

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jill Ann Mikucki is an American microbiologist, educator and Antarctic researcher, best known for her work at Blood Falls demonstrating that microbes can grow below ice in the absence of sunlight. She is a leader of international teams studying study ecosystems under the ice.

#3799

Jonathan Solomon Stamler

#86825

Overall Influence

#3800

Gerard R. Wyatt

#86474

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Gerard Robert Wyatt was an American-Canadian biochemist and entomologist, specializing in insect physiology. He is known for important research on DNA. Biography Gerard Wyatt, as a boy of age eight with his family, immigrated to Canada. He attended Victoria College but transferred to the University of British Columbia, where he graduated in 1945 with a bachelor's degree in zoology. He then worked for a year at the UC Berkeley laboratory of Edward Steinhaus, an expert on insect-transmitted pathogens. In 1946 Wyatt returned to Canada to work at the new Laboratory of Insect Pathology in Sault Ste.

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