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 …

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#3851

Timothy Richard Mosmann

#87525

Overall Influence

#3852

Manoj Prasad

#67183

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Manoj Prasad is an Indian plant geneticist, molecular biologist and working as a Senior Scientist and JC Bose National Fellow at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research . Known for his research on the stress biology of plants and virology, he is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the National Academy of Sciences, India, the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Indian Virological Society and was a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award f...

#3853

Dieter Ebert

#85159

Overall Influence

Dieter Ebert is professor for Zoology and Evolutionary Biology at the Zoological Institute at the University of Basel in Basel, Switzerland. He is an evolutionary ecologist and geneticist, known for his research on host–pathogen interaction and coevolution, mainly using the model system Daphnia and its parasites.

#3854

Asao Hirano

#87560

Overall Influence

#3855

Kristina Curry Rogers

#65020

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Kristina "Kristi" Curry Rogers is an American vertebrate paleontologist and a professor in Biology and Geology at Macalester College. Her research focuses on questions of dinosaur paleobiology, bone histology, growth, and evolution, especially in a subgroup of sauropods called Titanosauria. She has named two dinosaur species from Madagascar, Rapetosaurus, the most complete Cretaceous sauropod and titanosaur found to date, and Vahiny, so far known only from a partial skull. She and Jeffrey A. Wilson co-authored The Sauropods, Evolution and Paleobiology, published in December 2005. Her resear...

#3856

Douglas Koshland

#64656

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Douglas E. Koshland is a professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Biography Koshland is the son of Marian and Daniel E. Koshland Jr. He earned his B.A. in chemistry from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in microbiology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of David Botstein. He then did his postdoctoral work with Leland Hartwell at University of Washington and with Marc Kirschner at the University of California, San Francisco.

#3857

Paul Knoepfler

#58036

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Paul S. Knoepfler is an American biologist, writer, and blogger. He is a professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy, the Genome Center, and the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. In 2013, Knoepfler was named one of the 50 most influential people in the stem cell field.

#3858

Nancy Andrews

#38980

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Nancy C. Andrews NAS is an American biologist and physician noted for her research on iron homeostasis. Andrews was formerly Dean of the Duke University School of Medicine. Biography Andrews grew up in Syracuse, New York. She earned a B.S. and M.S. from Yale University. She carried out her M.S. research with Joan Steitz at Yale University, studying molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and continued her graduate work with David Baltimore, earning an M.D.-Ph.D. at Harvard Medical School and M.I.T. . She completed her postdoctoral work with Stuart Orkin at Children's Hospital Boston.

#3859

Perry A. Frey

#50958

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Perry A. Frey is professor emeritus of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. Research in his laboratory centered on the elucidation of enzymatic reaction mechanisms.

#3860

N. J. Berrill

#83785

Overall Influence

1903 - 1996 (93 years)

Norman John Berrill was an English marine biologist. He was born in Bristol and received his BSc degree from the University of Bristol in 1924 and his PhD and DSc from University College London. In 1928, he joined the faculty of McGill University in Montreal, where, from 1946 to 1965, he was Strathcona Professor of Zoology. On 20 March 1952 he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

#3861

George Reilly Martin

#87652

Overall Influence

#3862

Paul D. Maclean

#87665

Overall Influence

#3863

David Goodall

#40514

Overall Influence

1914 - 2018 (104 years)

David William Goodall was an English-born Australian botanist and ecologist. He was influential in the early development of statistical methods in plant communities. He worked as researcher and professor in England, Australia, Ghana and the United States. He was editor-in-chief of the 30-volume Ecosystems of the World series of books, and author of over 100 publications. He was known as Australia's oldest working scientist, still editing ecology papers at age 103. Long an advocate of voluntary euthanasia legalisation, he ended his own life in Switzerland via physician-assisted suicide at age...

#3864

Florian Krammer

#77871

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Florian Krammer is an Austrian-American virologist who has been Endowed Professor of Vaccinology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai since 2019. He was trained at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, where his mentor was Reingard Grabherr. He then completed his postdoc at Icahn under the supervision of Peter Palese. He has been the principal investigator of the Sinai-Emory Multi-Institutional Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Center since 2019.

#3865

Alexander D. Johnson

#65088

Overall Influence

Alexander "Sandy" D. Johnson is an American biochemist and Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

#3866

Melina Schuh

#56348

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Melina Schuh is a German biochemist and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. She is known for her work on meiosis in mammalian oocytes, for her studies on the mechanisms leading to the age-related decline in female fertility, and for the development of the Trim-Away protein depletion method.

#3867

Berislav V. Zloković

#87697

Overall Influence

#3868

Bert L. Vallee

#61707

Overall Influence

1919 - 2010 (91 years)

Bert L. Vallee was an Edgar M. Bronfman Distinguished Senior Professor at the Harvard Medical School. He was the founder and president of the Endowment and the CBBSM . Early life and career Vallee received his M.D degree from New York University in 1943 and subsequently held positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School in Medicine and Biochemistry. Vallee was a member of the Medical and Science Faculty of Harvard University since 1948. He was the Founding Director of the Biophysics Research Laboratory at Harvard , which was established in 1954 by The Rockefeller Foundation.

#3869

Pier Giorgio Bianco

#57269

Overall Influence

#3870

Hiroyuki Motomura

#72587

Overall Influence

#3871

Laurent Excoffier

#87745

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

#3872

Rod Markin

#35751

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Rodney Smith Markin , is an American pathologist and authority in the field of laboratory automation. In 1993, he designed and created one of the world's first automated clinical laboratory specimen, device and analyzer management systems. In the mid-1990s, he chaired a standards group called the Clinical Testing Automation Standards Steering Committee of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, which later evolved into an area committee of the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute.

#3873

William Ian Beardmore Beveridge

#31384

Overall Influence

1908 - 2006 (98 years)

William Ian Beardmore Beveridge was an Australian animal pathologist and director of the Institute of Animal Pathology, University of Cambridge. He was born on 23 April 1908 in Junee, New South Wales, Australia, and died on 14 August 2006. He was the author of The Art of Scientific Investigation in 1957, and Influenza, the Last Great Plague, in 1977.

#3874

Suresh Rattan

#56119

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Suresh Rattan is a biogerontologist – a researcher in the field of biology of ageing, biogerontology. In addition to his professional research work on the biology of ageing, he is also very much interested and involved in the public communication of science and he likes to undertake explorations in the Indian classical music and semi-classical music by playing Tabla – the North Indian drums, as evident from music CDs "State of the Art: Small Town People" by Harry Jokumsen and other artists , and "The Fall and the Rise of a Woman" by Pearl in which he plays Tabla under his artistic name Shash...

#3875

Robin B. Foster

#71642

Overall Influence

Robin B. Foster is a botanist studying tropical forests. He co-originated the "tropical forest dynamics plot". Biography Foster graduated from Dartmouth College in 1966 with a Bachelor of Science in biology, and attained his Botany / Plant Ecology PhD in 1974 at Duke University under ecologist Dwight Billings. In 1979, while at the University of Chicago, work on Barro Colorado Island with frequent coauthor Stephen P. Hubbell contributed to the development of the first tropical forest dynamics plot, leading to a global network of 18 such parcels. The "audacious" plan was to periodically map and measure every tree within .

#3876

Firdausi Qadri

#72469

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Firdausi Qadri is a Bangladeshi scientist with specialization in immunology and infectious disease research. She has worked over 25 years on the development of vaccines for cholera and has expertise on other infectious disease like ETEC, Typhoid, Helicobacter pylori, rotavirus, etc. Currently, she is working as a director for Centre for Vaccine Sciences of International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease and Research, Bangladesh . She also serves as chairperson of the Institute for developing Science and Health initiatives. Her scientific achievements lie in enteric infections and vaccines including Vibrio cholerae and enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli—major causes of severe diarrhea.

#3877

Thomas McGlashan

#58164

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Dr. Thomas McGlashan is an American professor of psychiatry at Yale University, well known for his academic contributions to the study of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Professional career He obtained his medical qualification from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, and was a staff member in Chestnut Lodge, where according to the New York Times, May 23, 2006, McGlashan "strived for years to master psychoanalysis, only to reject it after demonstrating, in a landmark 1984 study, that the treatment did not help much at all in people ... with schizophrenia.". These long term fol...

#3878

Alan Richard Tall

#87823

Overall Influence

#3879

David Steadman

#31332

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

David William Steadman is a paleontologist and ornithologist, and serves as the curator of ornithology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. His research has concentrated on the evolution, biogeography, conservation, and extinction of tropical birds, particularly in the islands of the Pacific Ocean. He has also authored over 180 scientific publications. He has conducted a number of digs at prehistoric sites and uncovered widescale extinctions caused by humans in the early stages of colonisation. He has conducted several expeditions to the Galápagos Islands, and...

#3880

Donald Enlow

#59138

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Donald H. Enlow was an American scientist known for his contributions to field of orthodontics through his work and understanding of the process of growth and development, especially of the human facial structure.

#3881

J. Richard McIntosh

#77297

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

J. Richard McIntosh is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. McIntosh first graduated from Harvard with a BA in Physics in 1961, and again with a Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1968. He began his teaching career at Harvard but has spent most of his career at the University of Colorado Boulder. At the University of Colorado Boulder, McIntosh taught biology courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Additionally, he created an undergraduate course in the biology of cancer towards the last several years of his teaching career.

#3882

Kenneth H. Nealson

#87840

Overall Influence

#3883

Konstantin‐alexander Hossmann

#87894

Overall Influence

#3884

Sara Shettleworth

#45535

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Sara J. Shettleworth is an American-born, Canadian experimental psychologist and zoologist. Her research focuses on animal cognition. She is professor emerita of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto.

#3885

Asher Mullard

#87959

Overall Influence

#3886

Yuan-Chuan Lee

#38142

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Yuan-Chuan Lee is a Taiwanese biochemist who is currently a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. A Hsinchu City native born on 30 March 1932, Yuan-Chuan Lee was the eldest son of painter Lee Tze-fan and his wife. Yuan-Chuan Lee graduated from Hsinchu Senior High School, as did his brothers Yuan T. Lee and Yuan-Pern Lee. Lee then attended National Taiwan University, where he earned a bachelor's of science degree in 1955, followed by a master's of science in agricultural chemistry in 1957. Lee completed his doctorate at the University of Iowa in 1962 under the supervision of Rex Montgomery.

#3887

Cheryll Tickle

#66541

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Cheryll Anne Tickle is a distinguished British scientist, known for her work in developmental biology and specifically for her research into the process by which vertebrate limbs develop ab ovo. She is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Bath.

#3888

Thomas Brandt

#87991

Overall Influence

#3889

Reuben Olembo

#36639

Overall Influence

1937 - 2005 (68 years)

Professor Reuben James Olembo was a prominent Kenyan academic, scientist and environmentalist. He was a deputy executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme , which he played a pivotal role in helping found, and United Nations Assistant Secretary General from 1994 to 1998. He became the Acting Secretary General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora , after his retirement from UNEP.

#3890

Wayne Yokoyama

#66035

Overall Influence

Wayne Yokoyama is an American biologist, currently the Sam J. Levin and Audrey Loew Levin Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He became a co-editor of the Annual Review of Immunology in 2013.

#3891

Terry Yates

#80284

Overall Influence

1950 - 2007 (57 years)

Terry Lamon Yates was an American biologist and academic who is credited with discovering the source of the hantavirus in the American Southwest in 1993. Yates' specialty as a biologist was the study of rodents and other small mammals.

#3892

Anthony Bean

#72263

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Anthony Russell Bean is an Australian botanist who works at the Queensland Herbarium and Brisbane Botanic Gardens, Mount Coot-tha. Since 1982, he has led the Eucalyptus Study Group of the Society for Growing Australian Plants.

#3893

Zachary Mainen

#69895

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Zachary F. Mainen is an American neuroscientist whose research focuses on the brain mechanisms of decision-making. Zachary Mainen moved to Lisbon, Portugal in 2007 and has been the Director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, since 2009. He is also leader of the Systems Neuroscience Lab and is the founding director of the International Doctoral Neuroscience Programme .

#3894

Elisabeth Binder

#72956

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Elisabeth Binder is a medical doctor and neuroscientist specializing in the study of mood and anxiety disorders. She is the director of the Department of Translational Research of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany. In addition to research, she is a member of the executive committee of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology .

#3895

Douglas L. Mann

#84359

Overall Influence

Douglas L. Mann is an American physician. He is currently the Lewin Distinguished Professor in Cardiovascular Diseases and professor of medicine, cell biology and physiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

#3896

Thomas C. Merigan

#81788

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Thomas Charles Merigan was born January 18, 1934 in San Francisco. He is an American virologist and the George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine, Emeritus at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Merigan's research first focused on human viral pathogenesis, basic and clinical studies of interferon, and then developing the first systemically active antiviral drugs including those effectively treatIng HIV/AIDS, several herpesviruses and hepatitis B. He is also credited with helping to develop the use of interferons as antiviral, immunomodulating and antitumor therapies. Merigan joined the Stanford faculty in 1963 and assumed full emeritus status in 2007.

#3897

Harrison Pope

#23510

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Harrison Graham "Skip" Pope, Jr. , is an American professor and physician, currently Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician at McLean Hospital. He is also the Director, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean's. According to the ISI index, he is one of the most highly cited psychiatrists of the 20th century. Pope's research focus is on substance abuse, especially anabolic steroids, marijuana, hallucinogens, and MDMA. In his book the Adonis Complex, he argues that the media fuels body image disorders for not only women but men as well. He has also wri...

#3898

Joachim Burger

#72960

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Joachim Burger is a German anthropologist and population geneticist based at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, where he runs the Palaeogenetics Group at the Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution .

#3899

John W. Fitzpatrick

John W. Fitzpatrick

#80651

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

John Weaver Fitzpatrick is an American ornithologist primarily known for his research work on the South American avifauna and for the conservation of the Florida scrub jay. He is currently the Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.

#3900

Trevor Platt

#84470

Overall Influence

1942 - 2020 (78 years)

Trevor Charles Platt was a British and Canadian biological oceanographer who was distinguished for his fundamental contributions to quantifying primary production by phytoplankton at various scales of space and time in the ocean.

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