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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School

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List of the most influential people in Biology,

#3901

James R. Downing

#30218

Overall Influence

James R. Downing is an American clinical executive. He is the president and chief executive officer of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Early life and education James R. Downing was born to Lillian and Robert W. Downing and grew up in Detroit, Michigan with five siblings. Downing enjoyed playing football and baseball while he attended Aquinas High School, and initially hoped to play baseball professionally. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where he initially majored in engineering before switching to biochemistry. He attended the University of M...

#3902

John K. Hewitt

#74141

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

John Keith Hewitt is a British-American behavioral geneticist and professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics. He was the Director of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics from 2000 - 2021. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1996.

#3903

Susumu Ito

#48473

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

Susumu Ito was an American cell biologist and soldier born in Stockton, California. He was a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese American. World War II Ito was in auto mechanic school when he was drafted into the military in 1940, two years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He worked as a mechanic, but was eventually assigned to the all Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which became the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was an artillery spotter assigned to C Battery. He was promoted to the rank of second ...

#3904

Simon Hugh Piper Maddrell

#33025

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Simon Hugh Piper Maddrell FRS was a British insect physiologist whose work predominantly focused on insect kidney organs—the Malpighian tubules. Based at the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge , his research involved insects such as Rhodnius prolixus and later, Drosophila melanogaster. At Cambridge he was a fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

#3905

Barry Fell

#31533

Overall Influence

1917 - 1994 (77 years)

Howard Barraclough Fell , better known as Barry Fell, was a professor of invertebrate zoology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. While his primary professional research included starfish and sea urchins, Fell is best known for his pseudoarchaeological work in New World epigraphy, arguing that various inscriptions in the Americas are best explained by extensive pre-Columbian contact with Old World civilizations. His writings on epigraphy and archaeology are generally rejected by those mainstream scholars who have considered them.

#3906

Neal Evenhuis

#69467

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Neal Luit Evenhuis is an American entomologist. He works at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii. Evenhuis has described over 500 species of insects since 1976, and is known both for his research and peculiar binomial names.

#3907

Ainsley Iggo

#62079

Overall Influence

1924 - 2012 (88 years)

Ainsley Iggo FRS was a New Zealand born neurophysiologist. Life He was born in Napier, New Zealand and studied at a farming college in Invercargill, where he won a bursary to study Agricultural Sciences at the University of New Zealand. There he was awarded a research scholarship to continue his studies in Britain. After gaining a BSc and an MSc in electrophysiology and neuroscience at the University of Otago in Dunedin, with a thesis on rumen digestion in sheep, he moved to Aberdeen to join the Rowett Research Institute, an agricultural research facility of the University of Aberdeen. There...

#3908

John Bell

#37265

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Sir John Irving Bell is a Canadian-British immunologist and geneticist. From 2006 to 2011, he was President of the United Kingdom's Academy of Medical Sciences, and since 2002 he has held the Regius Chair of Medicine at the University of Oxford. He was since 2006 Chairman of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research but in 2020 became a normal member. Bell was selected to the Vaccine Taskforce sometime before 1 July 2020. Bell is also on the board of directors of the SOE quango Genomics England.

#3909

Elisabetta Dejana

#85474

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Elisabetta Dejana is an Italian cell biologist and an expert on regulation of vascular system development. She has published widely and is frequently cited for her work. She has received several important awards. Dejana is a full professor at the University of Milan and has also been appointed full professor at the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University in Sweden.

#3910

Sally E. Smith

#77143

Overall Influence

1941 - 2019 (78 years)

Sarah Elizabeth Smith was a British-born Australian mycologist specialising in mycorrhiza. The Australian Academy of Science described her as "a world authority on the mycorrhizal symbiosis between plants and fungi". She was an adjunct and emeritus professor at the University of Adelaide, in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine.

#3911

John Roth

#68036

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

John Roger Roth is an American geneticist, bacterial physiologist, and evolutionist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He became well known for his early studies on the structure and regulation of the his operon of Salmonella, and went on to investigate regulation in systems as diverse as suppression by tRNA, NAD biosynthesis, and the Vitamin B12-dependent metabolism of small molecules such as ethanolamine and propanediol. In collaboration with David Botstein and Nancy Kleckner, he developed the use of transposons as genetic tools....

#3912

Jeffery Taubenberger

#44682

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Jeffery K. Taubenberger is an American virologist. With Ann Reid, he was the first to sequence the genome of the influenza virus which caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu. He is Chief of the Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section, Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health. Taubenberger's laboratory studies a number of viruses, including influenza A viruses , which are the pathogens that cause yearly flu epidemics and have caused periodic pandemics, such as the 1968 outbreak that killed an estimated one million people.

#3913

Ronald A. Dubner

#88244

Overall Influence

#3914

Marie Celeste Simon

#85873

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Marie Celeste Simon is the Arthur H. Rubenstein Professor of cell and developmental biology, the scientific director of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, and the associate director of the Abramson Cancer Center Core Facilities, at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Her research focuses on cancer cell metabolism, angiogenesis, and immunology.

#3915

Christopher John Lamb

#58751

Overall Influence

1950 - 2009 (59 years)

Christopher John Lamb was a Professor of Plant Biology at the University of East Anglia and director of the John Innes Centre. His field of study was plant–pathogen interactions, and he made many contributions to the understanding of plant pathology.

#3916

Gustavo Turecki

Gustavo Turecki

#62861

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Gustavo Turecki is a Canadian psychiatrist, suicidologist, neuroscientist who is a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair Tier in Major Depressive Disorder and Suicide. He is the sitting Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, the Scientific Director of the Douglas Research Centre, and the Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal . He works at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, where he heads both the McGill Group for Su...

#3917

Rudolf K Thauer

#88296

Overall Influence

#3918

John Webster

#56754

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

John Webster was an internationally renowned mycologist and head of biological sciences at the University of Exeter in England. He also served twice as president of the British Mycological Society. He is recognised for determining the physiological mechanism underpinning fungal spore release, though is probably best known by students of mycology for his influential textbook, Introduction to Fungi.

#3919

Noah Fierer

#65157

Overall Influence

Noah Fierer is an American microbial ecologist. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Early life and education Fierer was raised in Pennsylvania, US. He completed his Bachelor of Arts degree at Oberlin College in 1995 and his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003.

#3920

Diane Mary Bridson

#88257

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Diane Mary Bridson is a British botanist. Biography Bridson entered the Herbarium at Kew Gardens in 1963 starting as an assistant in the African section, working on Rubiaceae, eventually becoming a Principal Scientific Officer. She was Assistant Keeper for a couple of years and retired in 2002. She was senior tutor on Kew's 'International Diploma Course in Herbarium Techniques' and was co-editor of The Herbarium handbook, first published in 1989. She has published extensively on Rubiaceae, with a particular focus on Coffea, including the account for Flora of Tropical East Africa.

#3921

Fred Kummerow

#25803

Overall Influence

1914 - 2017 (103 years)

Fred August Kummerow was a German-born American biochemist. A longtime professor of comparative biosciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Kummerow was best known as an opponent of the use of artificial trans fats in processed foods, carrying out a 50-year campaign for a federal ban on the use of the substance in processed foods. He was one of the pioneers in establishing the connection between trans fats and heart disease, and he helped to cement the inclusion of trans fats into the Nurses' Health Study. He also helped discover that it is oxidized cholesterol, rather than...

#3922

Paula Tallal

#38507

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Paula Tallal is a Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience and co-director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Tallal is a participant on scientific advisory boards and government committees for both learning disabilities and developmental language disorders.

#3923

Andrew Whiten

#48870

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

David Andrew Whiten, known as Andrew Whiten is a British zoologist and psychologist, Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, and Professor Wardlaw Emeritus at University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is known for his research in social cognition, specifically on social learning, tradition and the evolution of culture, social Machiavellian intelligence, autism and imitation, as well as the behavioral ecology of sociality. In 1996, Whiten and his colleagues invented an artificial fruit that allowed to study learning in apes and humans.

#3924

Jenny Graves

#77305

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Jennifer Ann Marshall Graves is an Australian geneticist. She is Distinguished Professor within the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science, La Trobe University, Australia and Professor Emeritus of the Australian National University.

#3925

Pierre Joliot

#5130

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Pierre Adrien Joliot-Curie is a noted French biologist and researcher for the CNRS. A researcher there since 1956, he became a Director of Research in 1974 and a member of their scientific council in 1992. He was a scientific advisor to the French Prime Minister from 1985 to 1986 and is a member of Academia Europæa. He was made a commander of the Ordre National du Mérite in 1982 and of the Légion d'honneur in 1984.

#3926

Armin Geus

#55550

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Armin Geus is a German medical historian and historian of biology. Career Geus received his academic education in zoology with a specialisation in parasitology. In 1964, he obtained his PhD for a work on the gregarinasina of Central European arthropods. In 1973, he became professor for history of medicine at the University of Marburg, a post he held until his retirement. In 1976, Geus founded the Basilisken-Presse, a publishing house specialized in the history of science, particularly the history of biology. In 1991, he established the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie .

#3927

Walter Neupert

#88384

Overall Influence

#3928

Martin Zenke

#74253

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Martin Zenke born August 7, 1953, in Korbach is a German biochemist, cell biologist, professor for cell biology and scientist, who is conducting research on stem cells and biomedical engineering. Biography Martin Zenke grew up in Korbach/Waldeck, Germany and finished school at Alte Landesschule in Korbach in 1972. He studied chemistry/biochemistry and medicine at Philipps-University, Marburg/Lahn, Germany and graduated in 1978 with a study on “The ribonucleotide reductase in synchronized cultures of Saccharomyces cerevisiae ”.

#3929

Viviane Tabar

#72164

Overall Influence

Viviane Tabar is an American neurosurgeon, the Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York since 2017. Biography Tabar took her medical degree from the American University of Beirut. It was followed by a neurosurgical residency at the University of Massachusetts. She did postdoctoral work at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

#3930

Patrick Blanc

#14249

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Patrick Blanc is a French botanist who works at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where he specializes in plants from tropical forests. He is the modern innovator of the green wall, specifically, he invented the modern vertical hydroponics garden, which distinguishes it from its predecessors .

#3931

John J. Lemasters

#88433

Overall Influence

#3932

J. Anthony Movshon

#53343

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Joseph Anthony Movshon is an American neuroscientist. He has made contributions to the understanding of the brain mechanisms that represent the form and motion of objects, and the way these mechanisms contribute to perceptual judgments and visually guided movement. He is a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science.

#3933

Alexander Spirin

#80605

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Alexander Sergeevich Spirin was a Russian biochemist, Distinguished Professor at the Lomonosov Moscow State University , a Director of Institute of Protein Research Russian Academy of Sciences, Puschino , Moscow Region , Academician of Russian Academy of Sciences. His primary scientific interests in biochemistry included nucleic acids and protein biosynthesis.

#3934

Gary Allan Polis

#55509

Overall Influence

1946 - 2000 (54 years)

Gary Allan Polis was an arachnologist and the world's leading expert on scorpions. Education and career Polis was born in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Loyola University in 1969. Polis received an M.A. in 1975 and a Ph.D. in biology in 1977 from the University of California, Riverside.

#3935

Gerald Fischbach

Gerald Fischbach

#59269

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Gerald D. Fischbach is an American neuroscientist. He received his M.D. from the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University in 1965 before beginning his research career at the National Institutes of Health in 1966, where his research focused on the mechanisms of neuromuscular junctions. After his tenure at the National Institutes of Health, Fischbach was a professor at Harvard University Medical School from 1972 to 1981 and from 1990 to 1998 and the Washington University School of Medicine from 1981 to 1990. In 1998, he was named the director of the National Institute of Neurological...

#3936

Mahadeva Subramania Mani

#40201

Overall Influence

1908 - 2003 (95 years)

Mahadeva Subramania Mani aka Dr MS Mani was an Indian entomologist especially famous for his studies on high altitude entomology. Early life and career Early school records and the University of Madras, MA Degree certificate show his name as M. Subramanya. Later on, sometime early during his service career, he recorded his name as Mahadev Subra Mani a.k.a. Mahadeva Subra Mani a.k.a. M. S. Mani.

#3937

Mark Bear

#79035

Overall Influence

Mark Firman Bear is an American neuroscientist. He is currently the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator; an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a Member of the National Academy of Medicine.

#3938

Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg

#72402

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg is a German psychiatrist and professor in the Medical Faculty Mannheim at Heidelberg University. He is also the director and CEO of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, as well as medical director of their Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy. His research includes work on the genetics of complex psychiatric disorders. He has also used neuroimaging to study the neurobiological basis of mental disorders such as Williams Syndrome, and the effects of living in urban areas on mental health and the human brain.

#3939

Brett Finlay

#79641

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

B. Brett Finlay, is a Canadian microbiologist well known for his contributions to understanding how microbes cause disease in people and developing new tools for fighting infections, as well as the role the microbiota plays in human health and disease. Science.ca describes him as one of the world's foremost experts on the molecular understanding of the ways bacteria infect their hosts. He also led the SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative and developed vaccines to SARS and a bovine vaccine to E. coli O157:H7. His current research interests focus on pathogenic E. coli and Salmonella pathogenicity, and the role of the microbiota in infections, asthma, and malnutrition.

#3940

Howard Kapnek Schachman

#87224

Overall Influence

1918 - 2016 (98 years)

Howard Kapnek Schachman was a graduate school professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Early life Schachman was born in Philadelphia in 1918. In high school, he was interested in sociopolitical issues, inspired by his mother. He initially pursued liberal arts in college while studying to become a rabbi, before switching to chemical engineering in a university. He transferred from the University of Pennsylvania to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he graduated in 1939 with a chemical engineering degree.

#3941

B K Thelma

#53917

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

B K Thelma commonly known as Bittianda Kuttapa Thelma is a professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Delhi, South Campus, New Delhi, India. She is the Principal investigator and Co-ordinator of the Centre of excellence on Genomes Sciences and Predictive Medicine funded by the Govt. of India. She is also the Co-ordinator of a major project on newborn screening for inborn errors of metabolism in Delhi state which aims to demonstrate the feasibility of mandatory screening of newborns in the country and to generate epidemiological data for the testable IEMs in the genetically di...

#3942

David S. Goldstein

#88585

Overall Influence

#3943

John R. Riordan

#58740

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Richard Riordan, OC is a Canadian biochemist, noted for his research into cystic fibrosis. After acquiring his bachelor's degree in 1966 from the University of Toronto, he studied and received a doctorate in biochemistry from the same university in 1970. His next three years were spent at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt. He then returned to the University of Toronto, where he worked as a professor in the Biochemistry department from 1974. Prior to retiring in 2018, Riordan was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a member of the Biochemistry and Biophysics Department studying the structure and function of CFTR.

#3944

Harry Elderfield

#78275

Overall Influence

1943 - 2016 (73 years)

Professor Henry "Harry" Elderfield , was Professor of Ocean Chemistry and Palaeochemistry at the Godwin Laboratory in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He made his name in ocean chemistry and palaeochemistry, using trace metals and isotopes in biogenic carbonate as palaeochemical tracers, and studying the chemistry of modern and ancient oceans - especially those of the glacial epoch and the Cenozoic.

#3945

Víctor J. Ferrans

#88622

Overall Influence

#3946

Amita Aggarwal

#24515

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Amita Aggarwal is an Indian clinical immunologist, rheumatologist and a Professor and Head at the Department of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology of the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. Known for her studies in autoimmune rheumatic diseases, Aggarwal is a recipient of the Shakuntala Amir Chand Award of the Indian Council of Medical Research and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, National Academy of Medical Sciences and the National Academy of Medical Sciences. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded her...

#3947

Sylvain Lesné

#66966

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Sylvain E. Lesné is a French neuroscientist and associate professor at the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota Medical School, known for his research into Alzheimer's disease. He is the primary author of a 2006 Nature paper that is foundational in the hypothesis that one specific toxic oligomer of the amyloid beta protein, known as Aβ*56, is a cause of memory impairment in Alzheimer's, aligned with the prevailing amyloid hypothesis.

#3948

Una Ryan

#55923

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Una Ryan is a British-American biologist who has conducted research on vascular biology, publishing over 300 papers. After an extended research and academic career she began a career in the biotech industry. She was Director for Health Sciences of Monsanto Company; CEO, president and director of AVANT Immunotherapeutics; and is currently the chairman of The Bay Area BioEconomy Initiative, among many other associations. She is an angel investor and focuses her funds on women-led companies. She has won numerous awards and recognition during her career including the National Institute of Health's 10-year merit award, Order of the British Empire and the Albert Einstein Award.

#3949

Ragan Callaway

#66940

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Dr. Ragan Callaway is a prominent plant and community ecologist that obtained his Masters of Science at the University of Tennessee in 1983 and his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1990. Currently, he researches and teaches out of the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana. His research concentrates on the interactions within plant communities and ecosystems, predominantly those in alpine environments.

#3950

Konstantin Efetov

Konstantin Efetov

#67243

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Konstantin Aleksandrovich Efetov is a Ukrainian biologist and biochemist, Honored Scientist of Ukraine, Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural History, Professor, Dr. Biol. Sci., Head of the Department of Biological Chemistry and Laboratory of Biotechnology of the Crimea State Medical University.

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