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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#4401
Andrew J. Saykin
#93873
Overall Influence
#4402
Robert David Siegel
#83933
Overall Influence
Robert Siegel is a professor at Stanford University with appointments in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, The Program in Human Biology, the Center for African Studies, and the Woods Institute for the Environment. For more than 20 years, he served as the Course Director of the Infectious Disease component of the preclinical curriculum. He has taught the following Sophomore College courses: The Stanford Safari , Smallpox: Lethal Legacy, Forbidding Future , The Coming Influenza Pandemic , and Measles Sneezes, Things That go Mumps in the Night , and Viruses in the News . Dr. Siegel a...
Go to Profile#4403
Peter A. Stewart
#48664
Overall Influence
1921 - 1993 (72 years)
Peter Arthur Robert Stewart was a Canadian physiologist who introduced an alternate approach to understanding acid–base physiology. He outlined his model in a paper in 1978, and explained it his 1981 book, How to Understand Acid–Base. The book was unavailable for many years, then made available on-line and finally reprinted in 2009, with additional chapters on current applications in clinical medicine.
Go to Profile#4404
Richard Vogt
#63937
Overall Influence
1949 - 2021 (72 years)
Richard Carl "Dick" Vogt was an American herpetologist based in Brazil. He was the director of the Centro de Estudos de Quelônios da Amazônia at the National Institute of Amazonian Research . Career Vogt received his PhD in 1978 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his dissertation focused on the systematics and ecology of the false map turtle . The same year, he became a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#4405
Zachary Blount
#80179
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Zachary D. Blount is an American evolutionary biologist best known for his work on the evolution of a key innovation, aerobic growth on citrate, in one of the twelve populations of the E. coli long-term evolution experiment. Blount is a research assistant professor working with Richard Lenski at Michigan State University. He was previously a postdoctoral research assistant for Lenski, and was a visiting assistant professor of biology at Kenyon College from 2018 to 2019.
Go to Profile#4406
Elmer Noble
#40267
Overall Influence
1909 - 2001 (92 years)
Elmer Ray Noble, was professor of zoology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an internationally recognized protozoologist and parasitologist. Noble was born in Pyongyang, Korea, to American Methodist missionary parents, William Arthur Noble and Mattie Wilcox Noble. He lived with his family in Korea until 1927, when he and his identical twin brother, Glenn Arthur Noble, moved to the United States to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. in zoology, an M.A. in zoology, and a Ph.D. in protozoology and parasitology.
Go to Profile#4407
Margaret Bryan Davis
#86046
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Dr. Margaret Bryan Davis is an American palynologist and paleoecologist, who used pollen data to study the vegetation history of the past 21,000 years . She showed conclusively that temperate- and boreal-forest species migrated at different rates and in different directions while forming a changing mosaic of communities. Early in her career, she challenged the standard methods and prevailing interpretations of the data and fostered rigorous analysis in palynology. As a leading figure in ecology and paleoecology, she served as president of the Ecological Society of America and the American Qua...
Go to Profile#4408
Anne-Claude Gingras
#87333
Overall Influence
Anne-Claude Gingras is a senior investigator at Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, and a professor in the department of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto. She is an expert in mass spectrometry based proteomics technology that allows identification and quantification of protein from various biological samples.
Go to Profile#4409
Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles
#90732
Overall Influence
Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles, an American physician, is the David S. Gottesman Professor of Immunology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. a specialist in primary immunodeficiency disorders. She is also director of the Immunodeficiency Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital, and the program director of their Allergy Immunology Fellowship training program.
Go to Profile#4410
Olaf B. Paulson
#85585
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Olaf Bjarne Paulson is a Danish neuroscientist. Holding an MD and DMSc at Copenhagen University, he worked in collaboration with Niels A. Lassen. His research focused on the physiology and pathophysiology of the cerebral circulation and metabolism. In the 1990s the research moved into positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance . Former Chairman at the Neurology Department at Rigshospitalet , he was establisher and leader of the Neurobiology Research Unit in 1995. He is leading the Magnetic Resonance center at Hvidovre Hospital, Copenhagen and the chairman of the Danish Neurologica...
Go to Profile#4411
Dale Schoeller
#89990
Overall Influence
Dale A. Schoeller is an American biomedical physiologist based at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Work Schoeller's main work involves the measurement of human energy demands using a technique known as the doubly labeled water method.
Go to Profile#4412
David L. Nelson
#55475
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
David L. Nelson is an American human geneticist, currently an associate director at the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center , and professor at the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine BCM since 1999. Since 2018, he is the director at the Cancer and Cell Biology Ph.D program, and the director of Integrative Molecular and Biomedical Sciences Ph.D since 2015 at BCM.
Go to Profile#4413
Alessandro Serretti
#93972
Overall Influence
#4414
John Harte
#50268
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
John Harte is an ecologist and Professor of the Graduate School in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California at Berkeley. His work includes investigation into a maximum entropy theory of ecology and long-term experiments on the effects of climate change on alpine ecology.
Go to Profile#4415
Alireza Zamani
#48526
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Alireza Zamani is an Iranian arachnologist and taxonomist. Life and career Zamani has been interested in spiders since childhood, when he spent most of his time collecting and rearing different species that he could collect from the family garden. Influenced by his high school biology teacher, he decided to study animal biology at the University of Tehran in order to pursue his arachnological interests.
Go to Profile#4416
Fatimah Jackson
#44133
Overall Influence
Fatimah Linda Collier Jackson is an American biologist and anthropologist. She is a professor of biology at Howard University and Director of its Cobb Research Laboratory. Early life, family and education Jackson was raised in Denver, Colorado. Her mother was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fatimah's father was a mechanic who died when she was six years old. One of her great-grandmothers was descended from Choctaw people and was an herbalist. She attended elementary school, junior high school, and high school which were predominantly African-American.
Go to Profile#4417
Blossom Damania
#81850
Overall Influence
Blossom Damania is a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is known for her work on oncogenic viruses that cause human cancer. Damania has also been serving as vice dean for research at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine since 2016.
Go to Profile#4418
Jan Breslow
#78203
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jan Leslie Breslow is an American physician and medical researcher who studies atherosclerosis. As of 2017, he is Frederick Henry Leonhardt Professor at Rockefeller University and directs the university's Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism.
Go to Profile#4419
Margarita del Val
#63177
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Margarita del Val Latorre is a Spanish chemist, immunologist, and virologist. She coordinates the Salud Global platform run by the Spanish National Research Council . Early life and education Margarita del Val was born in Madrid in 1959 to the chemists Manuel del Val and Consuelo Latorre. del Val attended the Autonomous University of Madrid starting in 1976, during the Transition. During this time, increasing protests on university grounds against the Francoist dictatorship culminated in all Spanish universities going on strike starting in 1973, which was ongoing when she arrived at the university.
Go to Profile#4420
Armen H. Jr. Tashjian
#94017
Overall Influence
#4421
Mark Richmond
#83640
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Sir Marcus Henry Richmond, , known as Mark Richmond, is a British biochemist, microbiologist and academic. Early life and education Richmond was born in 1931, the son of H. S. Richmond, a film producer. He was educated at Epsom College from 1944 to 1949, and then studied biochemistry at Clare College, Cambridge, and remained there as a postgraduate for three years.
Go to Profile#4422
Abraham Kupfer
#72592
Overall Influence
Abraham "Avi" Kupfer is an Israeli American professor of cell biology, and the co-director of immunobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Kupfer discovered the immunological synapse at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. He first presented his findings during a Keystone Symposia in 1995, when he showed three-dimensional images of immune cells interacting with one another. His main focus is on teaching and studying the mechanisms of inter- and intra-cellular communication in the immune system.
Go to Profile#4423
Alberto Taquini
#40851
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Alberto Carlos Taquini is an Argentine biochemist and academic whose "Taquini Plan" resulted in the decentralization of Argentina's public university system. Life and work Taquini was born in Buenos Aires to Haydée Azumendi and Alberto Carlos Taquini, a renowned cardiologist. He married María Martha Bosch, and the couple had one daughter.
Go to Profile#4424
Ramón Latorre
#74383
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ramón Rogelio Latorre de la Cruz is a Chilean biochemist, The winner of Chile's National Prize for Natural Sciences in 2002, he has been recognized for his investigations in the field of the ionic channels of cellular membranes.
Go to Profile#4425
Peter Doran
#25601
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Peter T. Doran is an Americana earth scientist who is Professor of Geology and Geophysics and John Franks Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University. Prior to 2015, he was faculty in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Go to Profile#4426
John Robert Perfect
#94085
Overall Influence
#4427
Maurizio Corbetta
#94106
Overall Influence
#4428
Wolfgang Koenig
#94161
Overall Influence
#4429
Franciszek Kokot
#20869
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Franciszek Kokot was a Polish nephrologist and endocrinologist. He was known as a pioneer of nephrology in Eastern Europe. Kokot was a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, having previously served as its rector.
Go to Profile#4430
Gillian Bates
#67027
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gillian Patricia Bates FMedSci FRS is a British biologist. She is distinguished for her research into the molecular basis of Huntington's disease and in 1998 was awarded the GlaxoSmithKline Prize as a co-discoverer of the cause of this disease. As of 2016, she is Professor of Neurogenetics at UCL Institute of Neurology and the co-director of UCL Huntington's Disease Centre.
Go to Profile#4431
Michael Proctor
#71266
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Michael Charles Faraday Proctor PhD was an English botanist and plant ecologist, lecturer, scientific author based at the University of Exeter. He retired from his post as Reader in Plant Ecology at Exeter University in 1994.
Go to Profile#4432
Gareth J. Dyke
#82223
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Gareth John Dyke is a paleontologist whose work is concerned with the evolutionary history of birds and their dinosaurian relatives. His specific research interests include the phylogenetics of birds, the functional morphology of aves and non-avian dinosaurs, as well as the paleoenvironments of fossil vertebrates.
Go to Profile#4433
Robert Hall Michell
#94198
Overall Influence
#4434
Amishi Jha
#38154
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. Jha's research on attention, working memory, and mindfulness has investigated the neural bases of executive functioning and mental training using various cognitive neuroscience techniques. Past studies have focused on the method by which attention selects information as relevant or irrelevant and how working memory then allows that information to be manipulated.
Go to Profile#4435
Pamela Robey
#92144
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Pamela Gehron Robey is an American cell biologist. She is a senior investigator in the skeletal biology section at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Education Robey received her B.A. in biology from Susquehanna University in 1974. She completed a M.S. in biochemistry in 1977 and a Ph.D. in cell biology in 1979 from the Catholic University of America. Her Master's graduate thesis was titled The isolation, purification and characterization of A/J skin collagen and the effects of dexamethasone on skin collegen metabolism. Her 1979 dissertation was titled Studies on the Collagenous Component of a Tumor Basement Membrane.
Go to Profile#4436
Moussa B. H. Youdim
#94222
Overall Influence
#4437
Samuel B. Guze
#94249
Overall Influence
#4438
Johan Neyts
#88497
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Johan Hendrik Neyts is a Belgian virologist. He is head of The Neyts-lab of Virology, Antiviral Drug and Vaccine Research, which is part of the Laboratory of Virology and Chemotherapy at the Rega Institute for Medical Research, and full professor of virology at the Faculty of Medicine of KU Leuven. During the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, Neyts came to national prominence as an expert on the search for antiviral drugs and vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.
Go to Profile#4439
James Kitching
#56429
Overall Influence
1922 - 2003 (81 years)
James William Kitching was a South African vertebrate palaeontologist and regarded as one of the world’s greatest fossil finders. Career His work in the southern hemisphere, including Antarctica, led to the establishment of one of the world's finest fossil collections, housed at the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research in Johannesburg. He contributed greatly to the Karoo palaeontology of southern Africa, and Gondwana, and was an authority on the stratigraphic and distributional relationships of Permo-Triassic reptiles from South Africa. He published more than fifty papers and books on various facets of palaeontology.
Go to Profile#4440
Saba Valadkhan
#21736
Overall Influence
Saba Valadkhan is an Iranian American biomedical scientist, and an Assistant Professor and RNA researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2005, she was awarded the GE / Science Young Scientist Award for her breakthrough in understanding the mechanism of spliceosomes - "akin to finding the Holy Grail of the splicing catalysis field" - a critical area of research, given that "20 percent or 30 percent of all human genetic diseases are caused by mistakes that the spliceosome makes".
Go to Profile#4441
Richard Palmiter
#80796
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Richard Palmiter is a cellular biologist. He was born in Poughkeepsie, NY, and later went on to earn a BA in Zoology from Duke University and a PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. He is employed with the University of Washington where he is a professor of biochemistry and genome sciences. His current research involves developing a deeper understanding of Parkinson's disease. His most notable research is a collaboration with Dr. Ralph Brinster where they injected purified DNA into a single-cell mouse embryo, showing transmission of the genetic material to subsequent generation...
Go to Profile#4442
William Pao
#75080
Overall Influence
William Pao is an oncologist and Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer of Pfizer. He was previously the head of Pharma Research and Early Development at Roche and a professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is best known for his work in molecular oncology and cancer genomics.
Go to Profile#4443
Boris Sket
#90596
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Boris Sket was a Slovenian zoologist and speleobiologist. Sket obtained his doctorate at the University of Ljubljana in 1961 and became a research assistant at the former Natural sciences faculty. In 1965, he became an invertebrate zoology professor at the Biotechnical faculty in Ljubljana and remained at this position until 2006. Between 1983 and 1985, Sket served as a dean of the Biotechnical faculty, and later, between 1989 and 1991, as the 37th rector of the University of Ljubljana. He was retired as a scientific councillor and still lecturing speleobiology to graduate and post-graduate s...
Go to Profile#4444
Dr. David E. Comings
#94311
Overall Influence
#4445
Chantal Mathieu
#94328
Overall Influence
#4446
Nikos Kyrpides
#88566
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Nikos Kyrpides is a Greek-American bioscientist who has worked on the origins of life, information processing, bioinformatics, microbiology, metagenomics and microbiome data science. He is a senior staff scientist at the Berkeley National Laboratory, head of the Prokaryote Super Program and leads the Microbiome Data Science program at the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute.
Go to Profile#4447
Anthony Czarnik
#64817
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Anthony W. Czarnik is an American chemist and inventor. He is best known for pioneering studies in the field of fluorescent chemosensorss and co-founding Illumina, Inc., a biotechnology company in San Diego. Czarnik was also the founding editor of ACS Combinatorial Science. He currently serves as an adjunct visiting professor at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Go to Profile#4448
Joseph T. Coyle
#65065
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Joseph Thomas Coyle Jr. is an American psychiatrist and neuroscientist that is known for his work on the neurobiology of mental illness, more specifically on schizophrenia. He is currently the Eben S. Draper Chair of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He was President of the Society of Neuroscience from 1991–1992, and also the president of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2001. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine .
Go to Profile#4449
Donald Stuss
#65234
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Donald Thomas Stuss OC, OOnt, FRSC, FCAHS was a Canadian neuropsychologist who studied the frontal lobes of the human brain. He also directed the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest from 1989 until 2009 and the Ontario Brain Institute from 2011 until 2016.
Go to Profile#4450
Victor Nussenzweig
#94392
Overall Influence
