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,

#4351

Fred Rapp

#93391

Overall Influence

#4352

Benjamin L. Ebert

#77666

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Benjamin Levine Ebert is the Chair of Medical Oncology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and the George P. Canellos, MD and Jean S. Canellos Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Early life and education Ebert was born in Boston Lying-In Hospital to parents Michael and Ellen Ebert. His father was the Chair of the department of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine while his mother was an artist. Due to his fathers position, Ebert and his family lived in Baltimore, Maryland, and Bethesda, Tennessee. While in Tennessee, Ebert was enrolled at the University School of Nashville where he was ranked nationally in table tennis.

#4353

Donald Brian Calne

#93417

Overall Influence

#4354

Pere Alberch

#88772

Overall Influence

1954 - 1998 (44 years)

Pere Alberch Vie was a Spanish naturalist, biologist and embryologist. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1980 to 1989, and director of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid. He studied in the United States, earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley .

#4355

Wah Chiu

#49972

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Wah Chiu is a Hong Kong-born American biophysicist, currently the Wallenberg-Bienenstock Chair Professor in the department of bioengineering, department of microbiology and immunology and the Photon Science Directorate of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. He is a Stanford Bio-X affiliated Faculty. He was formerly the Distinguished Service Professor and the Alvin Romansky Chair Professor at Baylor College of Medicine where he was the founding director of the National Center for Biomolecular Imaging, and has been active in the new cryo-EM techniques allowing much hi...

#4356

Erik Jeppesen

#93435

Overall Influence

#4357

Christopher E. Mason

#77663

Overall Influence

Christopher E. Mason is a professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is also one of the founding Directors of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction together with Olivier Elemento. Mason has co-founded four biotechnology startup companies including Onegevity Health, Biotia, BridgeOmics, and Genome Liberty.

#4358

Anthony James Barkovich

#93469

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

#4359

Ralph Stoner Wolfe

#91532

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Ralph Stoner Wolfe was an American microbiologist, who contributed to the discovery of the single-celled archaea as the third domain of life. He was a pioneer in the biochemistry of methanogenesis. Biography Wolfe graduated in 1942 with a bachelor's degree in biology from Bridgewater College, where his father was a teacher. Ralph Wolfe earned a master's degree in bacteriology from the University of Pennsylvania and then worked for several years in a laboratory. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated there in 1953 with a Ph.D. in bacteriology. In the department of bacterio...

#4360

Ulla Hansen

#89438

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Ulla Hansen is a professor emerita of biology at Boston University. Her research group focuses on the study of transcription factor LSF . Biography Hansen received her bachelor's degree in 1974 from Oberlin College and her Ph.D. in 1980 from Harvard University, where she worked with William R. McClure. She then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Phillip A. Sharp. She became an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in 1983, and moved to the department of biology at Boston University in 1998. She served as associate chair of the department fo...

#4361

Paul De Vos

#89934

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Paul De Vos is a Belgian microbiologist. He is an emeritus professor of the University of Ghent, where he was also head of the biochemistry and microbiology department. He was editor of Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology, Volume 3: The Firmicutes, published in 2009.

#4362

David Sidney Feingold

#54121

Overall Influence

1922 - 2019 (97 years)

David Sidney Feingold was an American biochemist. Biography Feingold was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, United States in 1922. In 1944 he graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. Following his graduation, he enlisted in the United States Navy. Feingold served on an Landing Ship, Tank in the Pacific for nine months, from 1945 to 1946. From 1947 to 1949 he continued his studies in chemistry at the Chemical Institute at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland.

#4363

Peter Sarnow

#44472

Overall Influence

Hans-Peter Sarnow is a German virologist. He is a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. Early life and education Sarnow was born and raised in Konstanz, Germany. He completed his Master's degree at the University of Konstanz in 1979 before moving to the United States for his PhD at Stony Brook University. Upon earning his doctorate degree in 1982, Sarnow completed his postdoctoral research with David Baltimore at the Whitehead Institute.

#4364

Daniel Cosgrove

#93507

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Daniel J. Cosgrove is an American biologist and author, currently the Eberly Family Chair of Biology at the Eberly College of Science, Pennsylvania State University. As an author and scientist, he is widely cited by his peers and also held in libraries worldwide.

#4365

Karolin Luger

#67852

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Karolin Luger is an Austrian-American biochemist and biophysicist known for her work with nucleosomes and discovery of the three-dimensional structure of chromatin. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and works with the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.

#4366

Nikolai Vasilyevich Parin

#55623

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Nikolai Vasilyevich Parin was a Soviet and Russian ichthyologist, specializing in oceanic pelagic fish. He headed the Laboratory of Oceanic Ichthyofauna at the RAS Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, where he ended his career as a Professor after more than fifty-seven years. In his career, he described more than 150 new taxa of fish and participated in 20 major oceanic expeditions. Thirty-six species of fish are named in his honour.

#4367

Donald Sankey Farner

#93514

Overall Influence

#4368

Fred R. Volkmar

#46030

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Fred Robert Volkmar is a psychiatrist, psychologist, and the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology at the Yale School of Medicine. From 2006 to 2014, he was the director of the Yale Child Study Center and the head of child psychiatry at Yale New Haven Hospital. Prior to these appointments, he was the director of the Autism Program at the Yale Child Study Center since 1983.

#4369

John C. Swallow

#66549

Overall Influence

1923 - 1994 (71 years)

John Crossley Swallow FRS was an English oceanographer who invented the Swallow float , a scientific drifting bottle based on the messages in bottles that shipwrecked sailors hoped would reach inhabited shores, summoning assistance.

#4370

Ziv Bar-Joseph

#64383

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Ziv Bar-Joseph is an Israeli computational biologist and Professor in the Computational Biology Department and the Machine Learning Department at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. Education Bar-Joseph studied computer science at Bachelor of Science and Master of Science level, both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He gained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in computer science in 2003, under the supervision of David K. Gifford and Tommi S. Jaakkola. Following this, he was a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence...

#4371

David F. Wilson

#93583

Overall Influence

#4372

James L. Reveal

James L. Reveal

#60465

Overall Influence

1941 - 2015 (74 years)

James Lauritz Reveal was a U.S. botanist best known for his contributions to the genus Eriogonum and for his work on suprageneric names. His website, at PlantSystematics.org, also presents material on plant taxonomy including the Reveal system. He published extensively on North American flora, was a member of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, and was one of the authors of the APG II and APG III classifications.

#4373

France Adamič

#68513

Overall Influence

1911 - 2004 (93 years)

France Adamič was a [Yugoslav agronomist and author of several books on horticulture. He was professor of arboriculture, pomology and introduction to farming on the university in Ljubljana from 1961 till 1981. He was researching domestic and foreign cultivars of fruit trees, their physiology, the technology of their cultivation, and the organization and economics of fruit tree plantations. Adamič graduated from the University of Belgrade, where he also completed his doctoral studies.

#4374

Robb Krumlauf

#85554

Overall Influence

Robb Krumlauf is an American developmental biologist. He is best known for researching the Hox family of transcription factors. He is most interested in understanding the role of the Hox genes in the hindbrain and their role in areas of animal development, such as craniofacial development. Krumlauf worked with a variety of renowned scientists in the field of developmental biology throughout his time researching Hox genes.

#4375

John E. Heuser

#93604

Overall Influence

#4376

Robert Burton Nussenblatt

#93606

Overall Influence

#4377

Cheryl Hayashi

#38818

Overall Influence

Cheryl Y. Hayashi is a biologist who specializes in the evolution and functional properties of spider silk. She is a curator, professor, and director of comparative biology research at the American Museum of Natural History, while also serving as the director of the Institute for Comparative Genomics and Provost of Science. She was a graduate of Yale University, a professor at University California Riverside, and a 2007 MacArthur Fellow.

#4378

Philippe Bouchet

Philippe Bouchet

#72499

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Philippe Bouchet is a French biologist whose primary scientific fields of study are malacology and taxonomy. He works at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He is also a Commissioner of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.

#4379

Gad Avigad

#69725

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Gad Avigad is an Israeli biochemist. Biography Avigad was born in 1930 in Jerusalem. At 17, he joined the ranks of the Palmach. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, receiving a doctorate in 1958.

#4380

Michael M. Frank

#93653

Overall Influence

#4381

Paul Bornstein

#93656

Overall Influence

#4382

Colwyn Trevarthen

#35408

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Colwyn Trevarthen is Emeritus Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh. Background After training as a biologist in New Zealand at Auckland University College and Otago University, Trevarthen researched infancy at Harvard in 1967.

#4383

Jan-Peter Frahm

#85971

Overall Influence

1945 - 2014 (69 years)

Jan-Peter Frahm was a German botanist dedicated to the study of mosses. Career Frahm studied biology and geography at the University of Hamburg before switching to the University of Kiel for his undergraduate degree. He returned to Kiel and earned his Ph.D. in botany in 1972. He then worked at the University of Duisburg, where he was appointed professor in 1981. Research stays at foreign institutes and a visiting professorship at the University of Alberta in 1989 followed. He moved from Duisburg to the University of Bonn in 1994.

#4384

Jorge Sérgio Reis‐filho

#93696

Overall Influence

#4385

Fred Brown

#71945

Overall Influence

1925 - 2004 (79 years)

Fred Brown was a British virologist and molecular biologist. Early life He was born in Clayton-le-Moors, Lancashire and lived in neighbouring Burnley, where he was educated at Burnley Grammar School and played cricket for Burnley Cricket Club. He went on to study at Manchester University, where he graduated B.Sc. in chemistry in 1944 and received a Ph.D. in 1946.

#4386

Carl-Henry Alström

#45027

Overall Influence

1907 - 1993 (86 years)

Carl-Henry Alström was a Swedish psychiatrist who described a syndrome now named for him, Alström syndrome, a hereditary disorder that characteristically includes obesity in childhood, nerve deafness, and retinal degeneration .

#4387

Yang Dan

#55317

Overall Influence

Yang Dan is a Chinese-American neuroscientist. She is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She is a past recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, and Society for Neuroscience Research Awards for Innovation in Neuroscience. Recognized for her research on the neural circuits that control behavior, she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

#4388

Krystal Tsosie

#23144

Overall Influence

Dr. Krystal Tsosie is a Navajo geneticist and bioethicist at Arizona State University and activist for Indigenous data sovereignty. She is also an educator and an expert on genetic and social identities. Her advocacy and academic work in ameliorating disparities in genetics through community-based participatory research has been covered by various national news sources, including The New York Times, Nova, The Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Boston Globe.

#4389

Robert Galbraith Heath

#19282

Overall Influence

1915 - 1999 (84 years)

Robert Galbraith Heath was an American psychiatrist. He followed the theory of biological psychiatry that organic defects were the sole source of mental illness, and that consequently mental problems were treatable by physical means. He published 425 papers and three books. One of his first papers is dated 1946. He was profiled as a "famous American psychiatrist" in 1983 by Psychiatric Annals.

#4390

Bengt Westermark

#93771

Overall Influence

#4391

Ryuta Kawashima

#20483

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Ryuta Kawashima is a Japanese neuroscientist known for his appearances in the Brain Age series of video games for the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Switch. Biography Kawashima was born May 23, 1959, in Chiba City, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. In the 1970s, he enrolled in Tohoku University. After graduating with an M.D. at the school of medicine, he emigrated to Sweden to become a guest researcher at the Karolinska Institute. He moved back to Tohoku and is now a resident Professor with tenure. He is famous in Japan and is a former member of Japan's National Council, concerning Language and...

#4392

James N. Ihle

#93791

Overall Influence

#4393

John Jonides

#91058

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

John Jonides is an American cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist. He is the Edward E. Smith Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. He has been a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1995 and of the Society of Experimental Psychologists since 1996. He is known for his research on the malleability of human intelligence, and on the effects of Facebook use on happiness and life satisfaction. In 2011, he received the Association for Psychological Science's William James Fellow Award.

#4394

Dan James Pantone

#74077

Overall Influence

Dan James Pantone is an American ecologist and conservationist with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. A former professor at Texas A&M University, Dr. Pantone is a researcher who has published numerous refereed articles on agroecology and sustainable agriculture. In addition, he is a specialist in Geographical Information Systems which he has used to help conserve endangered species. Dr. Pantone has established his broad experience in numerous scientific disciplines by publishing diverse articles ranging from the biological control of pests to the conservation biology of end...

#4395

I. S. Newton

#93833

Overall Influence

#4396

Herbert C. Dessauer

#76793

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Herbert Clay Dessauer was an American biochemist, and a pioneer in the use of molecular systematics to clarify the evolutionary relationships of anole lineagess. For most of his career Dessauer was a professor at Louisiana State University's Medical Center.

#4397

John Allen Grim

#45565

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

John Allen Grim is the co-founder and co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, alongside his wife Mary Evelyn Tucker. He teaches at Yale University, where he holds appointments in the Yale School of the Environment, the Divinity School, and the Department of Religious Studies. He has also taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Bucknell University. He specializes in Native American religions and has studied the Salish people of Washington State and the Crow/Apsaalooke people of Montana. He has also undertaken field work with healing practitioners in East and Southeast Asia and with...

#4398

Keith Chater

#77665

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Keith Frederick Chater FRS is a British microbiologist, and John Innes Foundation Emeritus Fellow, at John Innes Centre. He is a member of Faculty of 1000. He is honorary professor at University of East Anglia.

#4399

Melvin Cohn

#93853

Overall Influence

#4400

Paul E. Lacy

#93855

Overall Influence

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