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,
#451
Thomas D. Brock
#14718
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Thomas Dale Brock was an American microbiologist known for his discovery of hyperthermophiles living in hot springs at Yellowstone National Park. In the late 1960s, Brock discovered high-temperature bacteria living in the Great Fountain region of Yellowstone, and with his colleague Hudson Freeze, they isolated a sample which they named Thermus aquaticus. "Life at High Temperatures", a 1967 article summarizing his research, was published in the journal Science and led to the study of extremophiles, organisms that live in extreme environments. By 1976, T. aquaticus was found useful for artificially amplifying DNA segments.
Go to Profile#452
Karl H. Pribram
#2557
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Karl H. Pribram was a professor at Georgetown University, in the United States, an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and distinguished professor at Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain. He worked with Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center of which he was to become director later. He...
Go to Profile#453
Derek Briggs
#8496
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Derek Ernest Gilmor Briggs is an Irish palaeontologist and taphonomist based at Yale University. Briggs is one of three palaeontologists, along with Harry Blackmore Whittington and Simon Conway Morris, who were key in the reinterpretation of the fossils of the Burgess Shale. He is the Yale University G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, and former Director of the Peabody Museum.
Go to Profile#454
Ivan Đikić
#13179
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ivan Đikić is a Croatian-German molecular biologist who is the Director of the Institute of Biochemistry II at Goethe University Frankfurt. Scientific career In 1991, he earned his MD degree from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zagreb. After finishing his medical studies, he continued to pursue his PhD thesis in molecular biology at the University of Zagreb and at the New York University School of Medicine until 1997. He continued to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Joseph Schlessinger in New York from 1995 to 1997 before starting his own group at the Ludwig Ins...
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Norman Horowitz
#14379
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Norman Harold Horowitz was a geneticist at Caltech who achieved national fame as the scientist who devised experiments to determine whether life might exist on Mars. His experiments were carried out by the Viking Lander of 1976, the first U.S. mission to successfully land an unmanned probe on the surface of Mars.
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Brian Goodwin
#8922
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Brian Carey Goodwin was a Canadian mathematician and biologist, a Professor Emeritus at the Open University and a founder of theoretical biology and biomathematics. He introduced the use of complex systems and generative models in developmental biology. He suggested that a reductionist view of nature fails to explain complex features, controversially proposing the structuralist theory that morphogenetic fields might substitute for natural selection in driving evolution. He was also a visible member of the Third Culture movement.
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Russell Doolittle
#15237
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Russell F. Doolittle was an American biochemist who taught at the University of California, San Diego . Described as a "world-renowned evolutionary biologist", Doolittle's research primarily focused on the structure and evolution of proteins. Highlights of Doolittle's decades of research include his role in co-developing the hydropathy index and determining the structure of fibrinogen.
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Paul Offit
#2373
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Paul Allan Offit is an American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, former chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases , and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
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James H. Fallon
#8381
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James H. "Jim" Fallon is an American neuroscientist. He is professor of psychiatry and human behavior and emeritus professor of anatomy and neurobiology in the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. His research interests include adult stem cells, chemical neuroanatomy and circuitry, higher brain functions, and brain imaging.
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Garth L. Nicolson
#16203
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Garth L. Nicolson is an American biochemist who made a landmark scientific model for cell membrane, known as the Fluid Mosaic Model. He is the founder of The Institute for Molecular Medicine at California, and he serves as the president, chief scientific officer and emeritus professor of molecular pathology. He is also Conjoint Professor in the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Newcastle, Australia. During the outbreak of the Gulf War syndrome, he was the leading authority on the study of the cause, treatment and prevention of the disease. He was appointed chairman of the Medical-Scientific Panel for the Persian Gulf War Veterans Conference.
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Arthur Galston
#9704
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Arthur W. Galston was an American plant physiologist and bioethicist. As a plant biologist, Galston studied plant hormones and the effects of light on plant development, particularly phototropism. He identified riboflavin and other flavins as the photoreceptors for phototropism, the bending of plants toward light, challenging the prevailing view that carotenoids were responsible.
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Frederick Campion Steward
#16406
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Frederick Campion "Camp" Steward FRS was a British botanist and plant physiologist. Early life and education He was born in Pimlico, London, but brought up in Yorkshire. He was educated at Heckmondwike Grammar School and then attended the University of Leeds, where he gained a BSc in biology in 1924 and then undertook research in the botany department.
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Vladimir Skulachev
#14266
Overall Influence
1935 - 2023 (88 years)
Vladimir Petrovich Skulachev was a Russian biochemist, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences , Doctor of Biological Sciences, Distinguished Professor at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he also was Dean of the Faculty of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics and Director of the A.N. Belozersky Institute Of Physico-Chemical Biology. Member of Academia Europaea. Laureate of the 1975 USSR State Prize and of the 2017 Demidov Prize. President of the Biochemical Society .
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Emanuel Margoliash
#12797
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Emanuel Margoliash was a biochemist who spent much of his career studying the protein cytochrome c. He is best known for his work on molecular evolution; with Walter Fitch, he devised the Fitch-Margoliash method for constructing evolutionary trees based on protein sequences.
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Armen Takhtajan
#10250
Overall Influence
1910 - 2009 (99 years)
Armen Leonovich Takhtajan or Takhtajian , was a Soviet-Armenian botanist, one of the most important figures in 20th century plant evolution and systematics and biogeography. His other interests included morphology of flowering plants, paleobotany, and the flora of the Caucasus. He was one of the most influential taxonomists of the latter twentieth century.
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Temple Grandin
#1732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mary Temple Grandin is an American academic and animal behaviorist. She is a prominent proponent for the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter and the author of more than 60 scientific papers on animal behavior. Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry, where she offers advice on animal behavior, and is also an autism spokesperson.
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Richard Fortey
#7516
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Richard Alan Fortey is a British palaeontologist, natural historian, writer and television presenter, who served as president of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007. Early life and education Fortey was educated at Ealing Grammar School for Boys and King's College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences specialising in geology. He received a PhD and DSc from the University of Cambridge.
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Michael Sheetz
#15112
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Michael Patrick Sheetz is a cell biologist, a pioneer of mechanobiology and biomechanics, and a key contributor to the discovery of kinesin. He serves as the Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology at Columbia University, former distinguished professor and the founding director of the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore, and former professor at Washington University in St. ...
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Nobutaka Hirokawa
#15739
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Nobutaka Hirokawa is a Japanese neuroscientist and cell biologist famous for research on the kinesin superfamily of motor proteins. He has been President and Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Human Frontier Science Program since 2012.
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Alan Templeton
#6362
Overall Influence
Alan R. Templeton is an American geneticist and statistician at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is the Charles Rebstock emeritus professor of biology. From 2010 to 2019, he held positions in the Institute of Evolution and the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology at the University of Haifa. He is known for his work demonstrating the degree of genetic diversity among humans and, in his opinion, the biological unreality of human races.
Go to Profile#471
Giulio Tononi
#3670
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Giulio Tononi is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine, as well as a Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science, at the University of Wisconsin. He is best known for his Integrated Information Theory , a mathematical theory of consciousness, which he has proposed since 2004.
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Yoshizumi Ishino
#7199
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Yoshizumi Ishino is a Japanese molecular biologist, known for his discovering the DNA sequence of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats . Biography Ishino was born in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. He received his BS, MS and PhD in 1981, 1983 and 1986, respectively, from Osaka University. From 1987 to 1989, he served as a post-doctoral fellow in Dieter Söll's laboratory at Yale University.
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Charles Sibley
#16045
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
Charles Gald Sibley was an American ornithologist and molecular biologist. He had an immense influence on the scientific classification of birds, and the work that Sibley initiated has substantially altered our understanding of the evolutionary history of modern birds.
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Trevor Robbins
#10116
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Trevor William Robbins CBE FRS FMedSci is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and the former Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Robbins interests are in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, behavioural neuroscience and psychopharmacology.
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Erik De Clercq
#14744
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Erik De Clercq M.D. Ph.D., is a Belgian physician and biologist. He studied medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven . He did research and later became a professor at the Department of Medicine, where he specialised in microbiology and immunology. He worked at the Rega Institute for Medical Research. He is one of the founders and the second president of the International Society for Antiviral Research.
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Robert Ballard
#1957
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Duane Ballard is an American retired Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is best known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew.
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Leonard Herzenberg
#12585
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Leonard Arthur "Len" Herzenberg was an immunologist, geneticist and professor at Stanford University. His contributions to the development of cell biology made it possible to sort viable cells by their specific properties.
Go to Profile#478
Ardem Patapoutian
#9468
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Ardem Patapoutian is an Lebanese-American molecular biologist, neuroscientist, and Nobel Prize laureate of Armenian descent. He is known for his work in characterizing the PIEZO1, PIEZO2, and TRPM8 receptors that detect pressure, menthol, and temperature. Patapoutian is a neuroscience professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. In 2021, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with David Julius.
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Heather Heying
#10026
Overall Influence
Heather E. Heying is an American evolutionary biologist, former professor, and author, who came to national attention following the Evergreen State College protests in 2017. She has been associated with the informal group known as the intellectual dark web and testified at the US Department of Justice forum on Free Speech on College Campuses in 2018. Heying opposed COVID-19 vaccines and promoted the discredited belief that the drug ivermectin is effective in treating the disease.
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G. David Tilman
#15944
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
George David Tilman , ForMemRS, is an American ecologist. He is Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota, as well as an instructor in Conservation Biology; Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; and Microbial Ecology. He is director of the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve long-term ecological research station. Tilman is also a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.
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Bruce Bagemihl
#4476
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Bruce Bagemihl is a Canadian biologist, linguist, and author of the book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. Life and career He completed his BA at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1981, and served on the faculty of the University of British Columbia, where he taught linguistics and cognitive science. He earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from UBC in 1988, with a dissertation entitled Alternate phonologies and morphologies.
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Otto Kandler
#15641
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Otto Kandler was a German botanist and microbiologist. Until his retirement in 1986 he was professor of botany at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His most important research topics were photosynthesis, plant carbohydrate metabolism, analysis of the structure of bacterial cell walls , the systematics of Lactobacillus, and the chemotaxonomy of plants and microorganisms. He presented the first experimental evidence for the existence of photophosphorylation in vivo. His discovery of the basic differences between the cell walls of bacteria and archaea convinced him that archaea represent an autonomous group of organisms distinct from bacteria.
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Philip Cohen
#17237
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sir Philip Cohen is a British researcher, academic and Royal Medal winner based at the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee.
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Anatole Klyosov
#5063
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Anatole A. Klyosov is a Russian scientist who worked in the fields of physical chemistry, enzyme catalysis, and industrial biochemistry. In 1989 Klyosov immigrated to the US. He spent most of his career developing ways to use enzymes to convert agricultural waste products into useful products — first to convert cotton waste to glucose in the USSR, and later in the US, turning paper mill waste into useful products. He later helped found a company, and later joined it as CSO, that was founded to use enzymes to alter existing anticancer drugs via glycosylation. In 2008 he began publishing work...
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Harry Eagle
#18951
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
Harry Eagle was an American physician and pathologist. He was born in New York City then studied, and later worked, at Johns Hopkins University before moving on to the National Institutes of Health. From 1961 to 1988 he worked at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is best known for Eagle's minimal essential medium, which is important in understanding how human and mammalian cells reproduce. He is also known for the Eagle effect. In 1936 he was the inaugural winner of the Eli Lilly and Company-Elanco Research Award. In 1973, he was a co-winner of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University.
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Marc Bekoff
#2110
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Marc Bekoff is an American biologist, ethologist, behavioural ecologist and writer. He was a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder for 32 years. He cofounded the Jane Goodall Institute of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and he is Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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Richard D. Alexander
#10021
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Richard D. Alexander was an American zoologist who was a professor at the University of Michigan and curator at the university's museum of zoology of in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His scientific pursuits integrated the fields of systematics, ecology, evolution, natural history and behavior. The salient organisms in his research are wide-ranging, from the orthopterans and Cicadidae to vertebrates: dogs, horses, and primates, including humans.
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Bernhard Hassenstein
#7918
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Bernhard Hassenstein was a German biologist and psychobiologist. Life and work Bernhard Hassenstein was a student of behavioral physiologist Erich von Holst and one of the leading researchers in the fields of behavioral biology and bio-cybernetics. His scientific work includes substantial contributions to the understanding of motion perception in insects and color vision in humans.
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Robert Edwards
#6657
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Sir Robert Geoffrey Edwards was a British physiologist and pioneer in reproductive medicine, and in-vitro fertilisation in particular. Along with obstetrician and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe and nurse Jean Purdy, Edwards successfully pioneered conception through IVF, which led to the birth of Louise Brown on 1978. They founded the first IVF programme for infertile patients and trained other scientists in their techniques. Edwards was the founding editor-in-chief of Human Reproduction in 1986. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of in vit...
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Suzanne Eaton
#20280
Overall Influence
1959 - 2019 (60 years)
Suzanne Eaton was an American scientist and professor of molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. Early life and education Eaton was born on December 23, 1959, in Oakland, California. One of Eaton's self-confessed role models as a child was Spock, due to his rational approach to problem solving. She was also a talented pianist, having played since the age of eight.
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Peter S. Kim
#11273
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Peter S. Kim is an American scientist. He was president of Merck Research Laboratories 2003–2013 and is currently Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University, Institute Scholar at Stanford ChEM-H, and Lead Investigator of the Infectious Disease Initiative at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
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Stephen C. Meyer
#4497
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stephen C. Meyer is an American author and former educator. He is an advocate of the pseudoscience of intelligent design and helped found the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute , which is the main organization behind the intelligent design movement. Before joining the DI, Meyer was a professor at Whitworth College. Meyer is a senior fellow of the DI and director of the CSC.
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Thomas Eisner
#13829
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Thomas Eisner was a German-American entomologist and ecologist, known as the "father of chemical ecology." He was a Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell University, and Director of the Cornell Institute for Research in Chemical Ecology . He was a world authority on animal behavior, ecology, and evolution, and, together with his Cornell colleague Jerrold Meinwald, was one of the pioneers of chemical ecology, the discipline dealing with the chemical interactions of organisms. He was author or co-author of some 400 scientific articles and seven books.
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Rinchen Barsbold
#9702
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Rinchen Barsbold is a Mongolian paleontologist and geologist. He works with the Institute of Geology, at Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. He is an expert in vertebrate paleontology and Mesozoic stratigraphy. Barsbold has been instrumental in the discovery and recovery of one of the largest dinosaur collections in the world. His work has helped to form a more modern understanding of the later stages of dinosaur evolution in Eurasia.
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Nicole Marthe Le Douarin
#15740
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Nicole Marthe Le Douarin is a developmental biologist known for her studies of chimeras, which have led to critical insights regarding higher animal nervous and immune systems. Le Douarin invented an embryo manipulation technology to produce chimeric embryos, from chicken and quails. Her research has shed light on the development of higher animal nervous and immune systems. She showed that precursor cells within the neural crest were multipotent. Her technique has also permitted her to shed light on the development of the blood and immune systems. Her work on antero-posterior patterning of th...
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Ronald C Kessler
#22225
Overall Influence
#497
Richard Laurence Millington Synge
#4052
Overall Influence
1914 - 1994 (80 years)
Richard Laurence Millington Synge FRS FRSE FRIC FRSC MRIA was a British biochemist, and shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of partition chromatography with Archer Martin. Life Richard Laurence Millington Synge was born in West Kirby on 28 October 1914, the son of Lawrence Millington Synge, a Liverpool stock-broker, and his wife, Katherine C. Swan.
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Daniel H. Janzen
#15313
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Daniel Hunt Janzen is an American evolutionary ecologist, and conservationist. He divides his time between his professorship in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology, and his research and field work in Costa Rica.
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Martin Raff
#19051
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Martin Charles Raff is a Canadian/British biologist and researcher who is an Emeritus Professor at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at University College London . His research has been in immunology, cell biology, and developmental neurobiology.
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James F. Bonner
#14917
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
James Frederick Bonner was an American molecular biologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, notable for discoveries in plant biochemistry. Bonner invented a better way to collect natural rubber from trees. As result of his invention Malaysia nearly doubled its production of natural rubber. Bonner was instrumental in the invention of a method of mechanical harvesting of oranges. One of his most notable discoveries was finding how histones control gene activity. Bonner was professor and professor emeritus of biology at the California Institute of Technology.
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