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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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Biology,

#3951

Allan Armitage

#67092

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Allan M. Armitage is professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia, US, where he teaches, conducts research, and runs the University of Georgia Horticulture Gardens—producing annual guidelines for annuals and perennials suitable for heat and humidity.

#3952

Richard Lathe

#66753

Overall Influence

Richard Lathe is a molecular biologist who has held professorships at the University of Strasbourg, the University of Edinburgh, and the State University of Pushchino. He was assistant director at the biotech company Transgene in Strasbourg, a principal scientist at ABRO, Edinburgh, and Co-Director of the Biotechnology College ESBS based in Strasbourg. Lathe is also the founder of Pieta Research, a biotechnology consultancy in Edinburgh, current academic appointments are with the University of Edinburgh and the State University of Pushchino. He resigned from his post at Pushchino in 2022.

#3953

Eugene Nester

#82813

Overall Influence

Eugene Nester is an American plant microbiologist who has made significant contributions to the field of microbe-host interactions in plants and especially on Agrobacterium species. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1994. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Washington.

#3954

Vamık Volkan

#17971

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Vamık D. Volkan, M.D., DFLAPA, FACPsa, is a Turkish Cypriot born American psychiatrist, internationally known for his 40 years work bringing together conflictual groups for dialogue and mutual understanding. Among his many other honours, he is the president emeritus of International Dialogue Initiative .

#3955

Bronislaw M. Honigberg

#80649

Overall Influence

1920 - 1992 (72 years)

Bronisław M. Honigberg was a Polish-born American zoologist. Born in Warsaw, he settled in the United States as a refugee during World War II. He was Professor of parasitology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research centered on unicellular organisms such as Trichomonadida and Kinetoplastida, the name which he invented. He was a leading authority on the naming system of protozoans. He led the Committee on Taxonomy and Taxonomical Problems of the Society of Protozoologists and made a new Systematics of Protozoa in 1964.

#3956

William Oliver Weigle

#88769

Overall Influence

#3957

Paul Eston Lacy

#63590

Overall Influence

1924 - 2005 (81 years)

Paul Eston Lacy was an anatomist and experimentalist and one of the world’s leading diabetes mellitus researchers. He is often credited as the originator of islet transplantation. Education Lacy was born in Trinway, Ohio in February, 1924. He was educated at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, both as an undergraduate and a medical student, obtaining B.S. and M.D. degrees in 1944 and 1948, respectively. From there Lacy matriculated to the Mayo Clinic and Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minnesota, for graduate work in anatomy and experimental pathology. He was awarded a Ph.D. in that d...

#3958

Jürg Ott

#76009

Overall Influence

Jürg Ott is Emeritus Professor of statistical genetics at Rockefeller University, New York. Awards In 2008, Ott received the Ming Tsuang Lifetime Achievement Award Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics. In 2010 he won the William Allan Award at the American Society of Human Genetics.

#3959

Peter B. Neubauer

#33199

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

Peter Bela Neubauer was an Austrian-born American child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Life The Neubauer family was part of a small Jewish community in Krems an der Donau, Austria, where Peter was born on July 5, 1913. He received his medical training at the University of Vienna and the University of Bern, in Switzerland, to which he escaped during the Nazi control of Austria. He completed his psychiatric training in Bern in 1941.

#3960

Paul Cooper

#70995

Overall Influence

Paul Cooper is the current editor in chief of the Australian Journal of Zoology. He is also currently associate professor, in the College of Medicine, Biology and Environment of Australian National University .

#3961

Patricia J. Kelly

#88825

Overall Influence

#3962

Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch

#66096

Overall Influence

1907 - 2007 (100 years)

Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch was a German-born U.S. geneticist and co-founder of the field of developmental genetics, which investigates the genetic mechanisms of development. Biography Gluecksohn-Waelsch was born in Danzig, Germany to Nadia and Ilya Gluecksohn. She grew up in Germany between World War I and II, where her family faced hardships including her father's death in the 1918 influenza epidemic, severe post-war inflation, and intense anti-Semitic sentiment.

#3963

Marie-Josée Fortin

#47329

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Marie-Josée Fortin is an ecologist and Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Fortin holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Spatial Ecology at the University of Toronto. In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

#3964

Jonathan Pruitt

#71900

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

Jonathan Neal Pruitt is a former academic researcher. He was an Associate Professor of behavioral ecology and Canada 150 Research Chair in Biological Dystopias at McMaster University. Pruitt's research focused primarily on animal personalities and the social behavior of spiders and other organisms.

#3965

Jacqueline Katz

#81308

Overall Influence

Jacqueline Marion Katz is an Australian-American microbiologist serving as the deputy director of the influenza division at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Education Katz earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology and Biochemistry and her Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Melbourne. Her 1985 dissertation was titled, The T cell response to influenza virus in the mouse. She completed postdoctoral training in influenza virology.

#3966

Max Cynader

#75624

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Max Sigmund Cynader CM, OBC, Ph.D, FRSC, FCAHS is a Canadian neuroscientist. He is the founding director of the Brain Research Centre and the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health at the University of British Columbia. Born in Berlin in a displaced persons camp, the son of Polish Jews who escaped Poland before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Cynader emigrated to Canada in 1951. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from McGill University in 1967 and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1972. He did postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute in Germany before joining the Faculty in the departments of psychology and physiology at Dalhousie University.

#3967

Nathan Wolfe

#55430

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Nathan Daniel Wolfe is an American virologist. He was the founder and director of Global Viral and the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University. Career Wolfe spent over eight years conducting biomedical research in both sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. He is also the founder of Metabiota, which offers both governmental and corporate services for biological threat evaluation and management. He serves on the editorial board of EcoHealth and Scientific American and is a member of DARPA's Defense Science Research Council. His laboratory was among the first ...

#3968

James Neuberger

#35819

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

James Max Neuberger is a consultant physician, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, part of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, and professor of medicine at the University of Birmingham. He is one of the editors of the journal Transplantation and is Associate Medical Director of NHS Blood and Transplant.

#3969

Dag Olav Hessen

#69181

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Dag Olav Hessen is a Norwegian writer and biologist, known for his work in the field of ecology. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He was awarded the Riksmål Society Literature Prize in 2008, and the Fritt Ord Honorary Award in 2010.

#3970

Robin A Weiss

#88937

Overall Influence

#3971

Anne Farmer

#45814

Overall Influence

Anne Farmer is emeritus professor of psychiatric nosology at the Institute of Psychiatry and was formerly lead consultant in the Affective Disorders Unit at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the trust's director of medical education. Farmer's focus is on genetic research in affective disorders. Farmer was previously professor of psychiatry at the University of Wales College of Medicine.

#3972

Nabil Seidah

#62170

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Nabil G. Seidah, is a Canadian Québécois scientist. Born in Egypt, he was educated at Cairo University, and subsequently at Georgetown University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1973. He emigrated to Canada and has been working at the Clinical Research Institute of Montreal since 1974. He is the director of the laboratory of Biochemical Neuroendocrinology. He discovered and cloned seven of the nine known enzymes belonging to the convertase family. During this period, he also greatly contributed to demonstrating that the proteolysis by the proprotein convertases is a wide mechanism that als...

#3973

Marian Carlson

#86514

Overall Influence

Marian Bille Carlson is a geneticist and the Director of Life Sciences at the Simons Foundation. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a past president of the Genetics Society of America.

#3974

Jon D. Cohen

#88969

Overall Influence

#3975

Burghardt Wittig

#80393

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Burghardt Wittig is the chairman of MolBio and a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Freie Universitaet Berlin in Berlin , Germany. His research focuses on the areas of gene regulation, DNA structures induced by torsional strain, chromatin structure, G-protein-mediated signal transduction, as well as therapeutic applications of genetic research and DNA-based vaccines. His research has been published in numerous leading scientific journals, including Cell, Nature, PNAS, and Science.

#3976

Michael Hausser

Michael Hausser

#73016

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Michael A. Häusser FRS FMedSci is professor of Neuroscience, based in the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London . Education Hausser was educated at the University of Oxford where he was awarded a DPhil in 1992 for research supervised by James Julian Bennett Jack on neurons in the substantia nigra.

#3977

John Fincham

#71682

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

John Robert Stanley Fincham FRS FRSE was a noted British geneticist who made important contributions to biochemical genetics and microbial genetics. Education and personal life Fincham was a son of Robert Fincham and Winifred Emily Western . His father was a self-employed Hertfordshire nurseryman, through whom Fincham developed his interest in botany. He was educated at Hertford Grammar School, then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences. He earned his PhD in the Botany School at Cambridge and then did a year's postgraduate research at the California Institute of Technology...

#3978

William Schull

#62735

Overall Influence

1922 - 2017 (95 years)

William Jackson Schull was an American geneticist and Professor Emeritus of Human Genetics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He worked for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan, was one of the founding members of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan, and was the founding director of the Center for Demographic and Population Genetics at the University of Texas at Houston. His scientific contributions include studies on the effects of ionizing radiation on human health, the role of heredity and the interaction of heredity and environm...

#3979

Igor Grant

#58402

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Igor Grant is an American psychiatrist. He is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He is Director of the HIV Neurobehavioral Research Program and the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research . Grant is the founding Editor of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society and founding co-editor of the journal AIDS and Behavior. His work focuses on effects of HIV and drug use, particularly alcohol, medical marijuana, and methamphetamine.

#3980

Martin Pall

#58821

Overall Influence

Martin L. Pall is professor emeritus of biochemistry and basic medical sciences at Washington State University. He is a specialist in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, and the effects of low-intensity microwave frequency electromagnetic fields on the human body. He believes that the expansion of 5G mobile phone networks and the use of wireless technology has negative consequences for human health.

#3981

Dabeeru C. Rao

#65109

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Dabeeru C. Rao is an Indian-American statistical geneticist. He is professor and director of the Division of Biostatistics at Washington University School of Medicine. Born in 1946, Rao was educated at the Indian Statistical Institute, where he received his Ph.D. in 1971. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled A Statistical Study of Tongue Pigmentation in Man, and his doctoral advisor was C. R. Rao. From 1971 to 1979, he was a geneticist in the University of Hawaii's Population Genetics Laboratory, where he worked with Newton Morton. In 1980, he joined the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine as associate professor and founding director of the Division of Biostatistics.

#3982

Francis Rose

#63404

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Francis Rose MBE was an English field botanist and conservationist. He was an author, researcher and teacher. His ecological interests in Britain and Europe included bryophytes, fungi, lichens, higher plants, plant communities and woodlands.

#3983

Hynda Kleinman

#88989

Overall Influence

Hynda K. Kleinman is an American cell biologist who was the chief of the cell biology section at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research from 1985 to 2006. She co-invented Matrigel.

#3984

Dirk Bootsma

#82731

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Dirk Bootsma was a Dutch geneticist. He was a professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam between 1969 and 2002. He and his research group discovered the cause of chronic myelogenous leukemia and furthered the understanding of the nucleotide excision repair.

#3985

Daniel Stern

#16594

Overall Influence

1934 - 2012 (78 years)

Daniel N. Stern was a prominent American developmental psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, specializing in infant development, on which he had written a number of books — most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant .

#3986

Colin A. Ross

#15311

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Colin A. Ross is a Canadian psychiatrist and former president of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation from 1993 to 1994. There is controversy about his methods and claims, which include recovering memories through hypnosis of Satanic ritual abuse and his own assertion that he can harness chi energy from his eyes to manipulate electronics.

#3987

Holger B. Deising

#78635

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Holger Bruno Deising is a German agricultural scientist specialising in Phytomedicine and president of the German Phytomedicine Society. Life and work Born in Krummsee, Ostholstein, Germany, Deising attended primary and grammar school in Kronshagen and Kiel, and passed the school-leaving examinations in 1975, after which he did military service .

#3988

Gerald Patrick Murphy

#89089

Overall Influence

#3989

Yuri M. Marusik

#38703

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Yuri Mikhailovitch Marusik is a Russian arachnologist. Early life and education Marusik was born in Sarny, a small town in West Ukraine, to Mikhail Adamovich, a school teacher, and Tamara Andreevna, a nurse. His interest in zoology started at an early age, from reading books about animals. Marusik started his studies at Leningrad State University in 1979 where he specialized in entomology under the supervision of Victor P. Tyshchenko. After his graduation in 1984, Marusik was accepted into a Ph.D. program in Magadan, working in the lab of Daniil I. Berman. His Ph.D. dissertation was devoted...

#3990

Lauren Vedder Ackerman

#89094

Overall Influence

#3991

Michael Kaback

#50059

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Michael M. Kaback is an American geneticist, physician, and Professor of Pediatrics and Reproductive Medicine, and chief of the Division of Medical Genetics, at the University of California–San Diego.

#3992

Joshua B. Bederson

#34527

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Joshua B. Bederson is an American neurosurgeon, Leonard I. Malis, MD/Corinne and Joseph Graber Professor of Neurosurgery, and System Chair of Neurosurgery at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, and an attending neurosurgeon at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

#3993

Mary K. Firestone

#74512

Overall Influence

Mary K. Firestone is a professor of soil microbiology in the Department of Environmentalal Studies, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Her laboratory's research focuses on the ecology of microbes in various soils, and their contribution to the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle in particular.

#3994

Nosratola D. Vaziri

#89115

Overall Influence

#3995

A. Michael Parfitt

#89121

Overall Influence

#3996

Leena Peltonen-Palotie

#41808

Overall Influence

1952 - 2010 (58 years)

Leena Peltonen-Palotie was a Finnish geneticist who contributed to the identification of 15 genes for Finnish heritage diseases, including arterial hypertension, schizophrenia, lactose intolerance, arthrosis and multiple sclerosis. She was considered one of the world's leading molecular geneticists.

#3997

Lars Olson

#89135

Overall Influence

#3998

Wendell Lim

#52119

Overall Influence

Wendell Lim is an American biochemist who is the Byer's Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the director of the UCSF Cell Design Institute. He earned his A.B. in chemistry from Harvard University working with Jeremy Knowles on enzyme evolutionary optimization. He obtained his Ph.D in biochemistry and biophysics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Bob Sauer using genetic and biophysical approaches to understand the role of hydrophobic core interactions in protein folding. He then did hi...

#3999

Dharam Ablashi

#76507

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Dharam V. Ablashi was an American biomedical researcher born in Lahore. He is best known for his co-discovery of Human herpesvirus 6 , an immunosuppressive and neurotropic virus that can cause encephalitis and seizures during a primary infection or when reactivated from latency in immunosuppressed patients.

#4000

Elwood Henneman

#49339

Overall Influence

1915 - 1996 (81 years)

Elwood Henneman was an American neurophysiologist who studied the properties of vertebrate motor neurons. Biography and Research Henneman received his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1937. In 1943 he finished his medical studies at McGill University in Montreal. During a research fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, Henneman and colleague, Vernon Mountcastle, showed that tactile information about the extremities is represented in an orderly map in the ventrolateral thalamus of the cat and monkey. Further research positions follow...

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