The Most Influential People Across History
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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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#401
Charles M. Rice
#7043
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Charles Moen Rice is an American virologist and Nobel Prize laureate whose main area of research is the hepatitis C virus. He is a professor of virology at the Rockefeller University in New York City and an adjunct professor at Cornell University and Washington University School of Medicine. At the time of the award he was a faculty at Rockefeller.
Go to Profile#402
Joseph E. LeDoux
#2173
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joseph E. LeDoux is an American neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions such as fear and anxiety. LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University, and director of the Emotional Brain Institute, a collaboration between NYU and New York State with research sites at NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, New York. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the band The Amygdaloids.
Go to Profile#403
Ruslan Medzhitov
#11472
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ruslan Maksutovich Medzhitov is a professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine, a member of Yale Cancer Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. His research focuses on the analysis of the innate immune system, inflammatory response, innate control of the adaptive immunity, and host-pathogen interactions.
Go to Profile#404
Endel Tulving
#2220
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Endel Tulving was an Estonian-born Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. In his research on human memory he proposed the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. Tulving was a professor at the University of Toronto. He joined the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in 1992 as the first Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and remained there until his retirement in 2010. In 2006, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada , Canada's highest civilian honour.
Go to Profile#405
Leonard Compagno
#12156
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Leonard Joseph Victor Compagno is an international authority on shark taxonomy and the author of many scientific papers and books on the subject, best known of which is his 1984 catalogue of shark species produced for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Compagno was mentioned in the credits of the 1975 film Jaws along with the National Geographic Society.
Go to Profile#406
Arthur Pardee
#14524
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Arthur Beck Pardee was an American biochemist. One biographical portrait begins "Among the titans of science, Arthur Pardee is especially intriguing." There is hardly a field of molecular biology that is not affected by his work, which has advanced our understanding through theoretical predictions followed by insightful experiments. He is perhaps most famous for his part in the 'PaJaMo experiment' of the late 1950s, which greatly helped in the discovery of messenger RNA. He is also well known as the discoverer of the restriction point, in which a cell commits itself to certain cell cycle events during the G1 cycle.
Go to Profile#407
Tak Wah Mak
#7745
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Tak Wah Mak, is a Canadian medical researcher, geneticist, oncologist, and biochemist. He first became widely known for his discovery of the T-cell receptor in 1983 and pioneering work in the genetics of immunology. In 1995, Mak published a landmark paper on the discovery of the function of the immune checkpoint protein CTLA-4, thus opening the path for immunotherapy/checkpoint inhibitors as a means of cancer treatment. Mak is also the founder of Agios Pharmaceuticals, whose lead compound, IDHIFA®, was approved by the FDA for acute myeloid leukemia in August 2017, becoming the first drug specifically targeting cancer metabolism to be used for cancer treatment.
Go to Profile#408
Temple F. Smith
#8913
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Temple Ferris Smith is an emeritus professor in biomedical engineering who helped to develop the Smith-Waterman algorithm with Michael Waterman in 1981. The Smith-Waterman algorithm serves as the basis for multi sequence comparisons, identifying the segment with the maximum local sequence similarity, see sequence alignment. This algorithm is used for identifying similar DNA, RNA and protein segments. He was director of the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center at Boston University for twenty years and is now professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#409
James McGaugh
#7864
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
James L. McGaugh is an American neurobiologist and author working in the field of learning and memory. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine and a fellow and founding director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.
Go to Profile#410
David Abram
#2635
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World , for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics ; his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as the online magazine Emergence, Or...
Go to Profile#411
John Avise
#14946
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Charles Avise is an American evolutionary geneticist, conservationist, ecologist and natural historian. He is a Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolution, University of California, Irvine, and was previously a Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of Georgia.
Go to Profile#412
Robert R. Sokal
#11583
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Robert Reuven Sokal was an Austrian–American biostatistician and entomologist. Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Stony Brook University, Sokal was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He promoted the use of statistics in biology and co-founded the field of numerical taxonomy, together with Peter H. A. Sneath.
Go to Profile#413
Joseph Felsenstein
#10337
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Joseph "Joe" Felsenstein is a Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of Inferring Phylogenies, and principal author and distributor of the package of phylogenetic inference programs called PHYLIP. Closely related to his work on phylogenetic inference is his introduction of methods for making statistically independent comparisons using phylogenies.
Go to Profile#414
Marilyn Farquhar
#12968
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Marilyn Gist Farquhar was a pathologist and cellular biologist, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Pathology, as well as the chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, who previously worked at Yale University from 1973 to 1990. She has won the E. B. Wilson Medal and the FASEB Excellence in Science Award. She was married to Nobel Laureate George Emil Palade from 1970 to his death in 2008. Her research focuses on control of intracellular membrane traffic and the molecular pathogenesis of auto immune kidney diseases.
Go to Profile#415
Stephen Barrett
#724
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Stephen Joel Barrett is an American retired psychiatrist, author, co-founder of the National Council Against Health Fraud , and the webmaster of Quackwatch. He runs a number of websites dealing with quackery and health fraud. He focuses on consumer protection, medical ethics, and scientific skepticism.
Go to Profile#416
K. VijayRaghavan
#12595
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Dr. Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan is an emeritus professor and former director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences. On 26 March 2018, the Government of India appointed him as the principal scientific adviser to succeed Dr. R Chidamabaram. His term as Principal Scientific Adviser ended on April 2, 2022. In 2012, he was elected a fellow of The Royal Society and in April 2014 he was elected as a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He was conferred the Padma Shri on 26 January 2013 and is also a recipient of the Infosys Prize in the life sciences category in 2009...
Go to Profile#417
Hilary Koprowski
#2958
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Hilary Koprowski was a Polish virologist and immunologist active in the United States who demonstrated the world's first effective live polio vaccine. He authored or co-authored over 875 scientific papers and co-edited several scientific journals.
Go to Profile#418
Shigekazu Nagata
#12922
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Shigekazu Nagata is a Japanese biochemist, best known for research on apoptosis, the process of programmed cell death occurring in multi-cellular organisms. Contribution Nagata identified Interferon in 1980 and Granulocyte colony-stimulating factor in 1986. He also identified a death factor in 1991 and its ligand in 1993, and elucidated their physiological and pathological roles in apoptosis.
Go to Profile#419
Arnold J. Levine
#11043
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Arnold Jay Levine , is an American molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1998 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry and was the first recipient of the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research in 2001 for his discovery of the tumor suppressor protein p53.
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Sune Bergström
#4999
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Karl Sune Detlof Bergström was a Swedish biochemist. In 1975, he was appointed to the Nobel Foundation Board of Directors in Sweden, and was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, together with Bengt I. Samuelsson. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982, for discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related substances.
Go to Profile#421
Miguel Nicolelis
#5952
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Miguel Ângelo Laporta Nicolelis , is a Brazilian scientist, physician and Duke School of Medicine Professor in Neuroscience at Duke University, best known for his pioneering work surrounding brain-computer interface technology.
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Ramon Margalef
#12088
Overall Influence
1919 - 2004 (85 years)
Ramon Margalef i López was a Spanish biologist and ecologist. He was Emeritus Professor of Ecology at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona. Margalef, one of the most prominent scientists that Spain has produced, worked at the Institute of Applied Biology , and at the Fisheries Research Institute, which he directed during 1966–1967. He created the Department of Ecology of the University of Barcelona, from where he trained a huge number of ecologists, limnologists and oceanographers. In 1967 he became Spain's first professor of ecology.
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Richard Henderson
#5997
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Richard Henderson is a British molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank.„Thanks to his work, we can look at individual atoms of living nature, thanks to cryo-electron microscopes we can see details without destroying samples, and for this he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry."
Go to Profile#424
Walter Bodmer
#8804
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Sir Walter Fred Bodmer is a German-born British human geneticist. Early life Bodmer was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and went on to study the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge as a student of Clare College, Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD in 1959 from Cambridge for research on population genetics in the house mouse and Primula vulgaris supervised by Ronald Fisher.
Go to Profile#425
Louis Ignarro
#4024
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Louis José Ignarro is an American pharmacologist. For demonstrating the signaling properties of nitric oxide, he was co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert F. Furchgott and Ferid Murad.
Go to Profile#426
George E. Fox
#9959
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
George Edward Fox is an astrobiologist, a Professor Emeritus and researcher at the University of Houston. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the International Astrobiology Society. Fox received his B.A. degree in 1967, and completed his Ph.D. degree in 1974; both in chemical engineering at Syracuse University.
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Mary F. Lyon
#10331
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Mary Frances Lyon was an English geneticist best known for her discovery of X-chromosome inactivation, an important biological phenomenon. Early life and education Mary Lyon was born on 15 May 1925 in Norwich, England as the eldest out of three children of a civil servant and a schoolteacher. She was educated at a grammar school in Birmingham. During that time, she said, she became interested in science thanks to a good schoolteacher and nature books she won in an essay competition. During the Second World War in 1943, she began her studies at Girton College, Cambridge at the University of ...
Go to Profile#428
Sankar Chatterjee
#11728
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sankar Chatterjee is a paleontologist, the Paul W. Horn Professor of Geosciences at Texas Tech University and Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta in 1970 and was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution from 1977-1978.
Go to Profile#429
Ira Pastan
#10643
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Ira Pastan is an American scientist at the National Cancer Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the AAAS and the American Society of Microbiology. In 2009, he was awarded the prestigious International Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for Medicine. His wife, Linda Pastan, was an American poet.
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Marc Van Ranst
#9093
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Marc Van Ranst is a Belgian public health doctor and Professor of Virology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Rega Institute for Medical Research. On 1 May 2007, he was appointed as Interministerial comissionar by the Belgian federal government to prepare Belgium for an influenza pandemic.
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Stuart Newman
#8217
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Stuart Alan Newman is a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY, United States. His research centers around three program areas: cellular and molecular mechanisms of vertebrate limb development, physical mechanisms of morphogenesis, and mechanisms of morphological evolution. He also writes about social and cultural aspects of biological research and technology.
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Charles DeLisi
#6899
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Charles Peter DeLisi is an American biomedical scientist and the Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering at Boston University. He is noted for major contributions to the initiation of the Human Genome Project, for transformative academic leadership, and for research contributions to mathematical and computational immunology, cell biophysics, genomics and protein and nucleic acid structure and function. Recent activities include mathematical finance and climate change.
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T. Colin Campbell
#3595
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Thomas Colin Campbell is an American biochemist who specializes in the effect of nutrition on long-term health. He is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#434
Vincent Racaniello
#14549
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Vincent R. Racaniello is a Higgins Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is a co-author of a textbook on virology, Principles of Virology.
Go to Profile#435
Samuel Mitja Rapoport
#11140
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Samuel Mitja Rapoport was a Russian Empire-born German university professor of biochemistry in East Germany. Of Jewish descent and a committed communist, he fled Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany, and moved to the United States. In 1950, as a result of an investigation of un-American activities, he was offered a professorship in East Berlin. He was married to the renowned pediatrician Ingeborg Rapoport.
Go to Profile#436
Ilkka Hanski
#15488
Overall Influence
1953 - 2016 (63 years)
Ilkka Aulis Hanski was a Finnish ecologist at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The Metapopulation Research Center led by Hanski, until his death, has been nominated as a Center of Excellence by the Academy of Finland. The group studies species living in fragmented landscapes and attempts to advance metapopulation ecology research. Metapopulation ecology itself studies populations of plants and animals which are separated in space by occupying patches.
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Joan A. Steitz
#13673
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins , which occur in eukaryotes. In September 2018, Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The Lasker award is often referred to as the 'American Nobel' because 87...
Go to Profile#438
Ronald M. Evans
#12499
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ronald Mark Evans is an American Biologist, Professor and Head of the Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory, and the March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Dr. Ronald M. Evans is known for his original discoveries of nuclear hormone receptors , a special class of transcriptional factor, and the elucidation of their universal mechanism of action, a process that governs how lipophilic hormones and drugs regulate virtually every developmental and metabolic pathway in animals and humans.
Go to Profile#439
Shigetada Nakanishi
#13524
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Shigetada Nakanishi is a Japanese biochemist and neuroscientist. Both a medical doctor and biomedical researcher by training, Nakanishi is the director of the Osaka Bioscience Institute and professor emeritus at Kyoto University. He has received several scientific awards for his research in neuroscience, having characterized the molecular structure or function of several protein receptors.
Go to Profile#440
Jon Beckwith
#12702
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Jonathan Roger Beckwith is an American microbiologist and geneticist. He is the American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#441
Tyrone Hayes
#6534
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Tyrone B. Hayes is an American biologist and professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in frogs, concluding that the herbicide atrazine is an endocrine disruptor that demasculinizes male frogs, causing them to display female characteristics, through a process known as feminization. Hayes is an advocate for the critical review and regulation of pesticides as well as other chemicals that may cause adverse health effects. He has presented hundreds of papers, discussions, and seminars on his research's conclusion that environmental c...
Go to Profile#442
Tomas Hökfelt
#17162
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Tomas Hökfelt is a Swedish physician and former professor in histology at the Karolinska Institutet from 1979 until 2006, when he got his emeritate. He was linked to the Department of Neuroscience and is specialized in cell biology.
Go to Profile#443
Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty
#8740
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty , PhD was an Indian American microbiologist, scientist, and researcher, most notable for his work in directed evolution and his role in developing a genetically engineered organism using plasmid transfer while working at GE, the patent for which led to landmark Supreme Court case, Diamond v. Chakrabarty.
Go to Profile#444
David Eagleman
#4005
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, author, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. He also directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law, which seeks to align the legal system with modern neuroscience and is Chief Science Officer and co-founder of BrainCheck, a digital cognitive health platform used in medical practices and health systems. He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.
Go to Profile#445
Alberto Mantovani
#12944
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alberto Mantovani is an Italian physician and immunologist. He is Scientific Director of Istituto Clinico Humanitas , President and Founder of the Fondazione Humanitas per la Ricerca, and Professor of Pathology at the State University of Milan. He is known for his works in the roles of the immune system in the development of cancer. His research on tumor-associated macrophages established inflammation as one of the causes of cancer. He was the first to identify monocyte chemotactic protein - 1 / CCL2 in 1983, and PTX3 in 1997. His works revealed the existence of decoy receptors in cell-signalling.
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Ruth Arnon
#8663
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ruth Arnon is an Israeli biochemist and codeveloper of the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone. She is currently the Paul Ehrlich Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she is researching anti-cancer and influenza vaccinations.
Go to Profile#447
Sidney W. Fox
#9315
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
Sidney Walter Fox was a Los Angeles-born biochemist responsible for discoveries on the origins of biological systems. Fox explored the synthesis of amino acids from inorganic molecules, the synthesis of proteinous amino acids and amino acid polymers called "proteinoids" from inorganic molecules and thermal energy, and created what he thought was the world's first protocell out of proteinoids and water. He called these globules "microspheres". Fox believed in the process of abiogenesis where life spontaneously organized itself from the colloquially known "primordial soup;" poolings of various simple organic molecules that existed during the time before life on Earth.
Go to Profile#448
Jeffrey Harborne
#18131
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Jeffrey Barry Harborne FRS was a British chemist who specialised in phytochemistry. He was Professor of Botany at the University of Reading, 1976–93, then Professor emeritus. He contributed to more than 40 books and 270 research papers and was a pioneer in ecological biochemistry, particularly in the complex chemical interactions between plants, microbes and insects.
Go to Profile#449
Duane Gish
#7106
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Duane Tolbert Gish was an American biochemist and a prominent member of the creationist movement. A young Earth creationist, Gish was a former vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research and the author of numerous publications about creation science.
Go to Profile#450
Adam Rutherford
#6390
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Adam David Rutherford is a British geneticist and science populariser. He was an audio-visual content editor for the journal Nature for a decade, and is a frequent contributor to the newspaper The Guardian. He hosts the BBC Radio 4 programmes Inside Science and The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry; has produced several science documentaries; and has published books related to genetics and the origin of life.
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