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,

#4501

Alexander N. Glazer

#94952
Overall Influence
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#4502

Simone Fulda

#94997
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
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#4503

Nicholas P. Restifo

#95001
Overall Influence
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#4504

Richard D. Klausner

#95022
Overall Influence
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#4505

William E. Jr. Bunney

#95028
Overall Influence
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#4506

J. Bastow Wilson

#95064
Overall Influence
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#4507

Józef Dulak

Józef Dulak
#79908
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Józef Dulak is a Polish scientist and professor of biological sciences from Rytro. Dulak conducts research in the field of medical biotechnology, molecular biology and biochemistry. Since 2005 he has been the head of the Department of Medical Biotechnology. at the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology at Jagiellonian University, with a tenure as deputy dean in the period 2006–2008.
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#4508

Steven G. Vandenberg

#73858
Overall Influence
1915 - 1992 (77 years)
Steven Vandenberg was a behavior geneticist who immigrated to the US after the Second World War, obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1955. From 1960 to 1967 he worked at the University of Louisville School of Medicine as director of the Louisville Twin Study. In 1970 he moved to the Institute of Behavior Genetics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he remained until his retirement. Vandenberg received many honors and awards during his lifetime, including being the first recipient of the Behavior Genetics Association's Dobzhansky Career Award in 1977. Vandenberg ...
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#4509

Mary Cameron

#81027
Overall Influence
Mary M. Cameron FRES is a medical entomologist in the United Kingdom. In 2019 she was the Professor of Medical Entomology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Education and career Cameron obtained a BSc in Zoology in 1983 from Bedford College and then a PhD in Entomology in 1987 from the University of London.
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#4510

Gerry Wright

#84578
Overall Influence
Gerard D. Wright, PhD, FRSC, is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, and Canada Research Chair in Antibiotic Biochemistry at McMaster University who studies chemical compounds that can combat antibiotic resistance in bacteria. He is also an Associate member of the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Pathology and Molecular Medicine. Wright was Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences from 2001 to 2007. He was the Director of McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research from 2007 to 2022. He is currently the executive director of Canada's Global Nexus for Pandemics and Biological Threats.
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#4511

Peter K. Hepler

#78657
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Peter Klock Hepler HonFRMS is the Constantine J. Gilgut and Ray Ethan Torrey Professor Emeritus in the Biology Department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who is notable for his work on elucidating the roles of calcium, membranes and the cytoskeleton in plant cell development and cell motility.
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#4512

Vincent Savolainen

#81585
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Vincent Savolainen is a biologist. Savolainen was born on 27 September 1966. He is of Finnish origin and holds Swiss, British, and French citizenship. Savolainen earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Geneva and obtained his doctorate at the same institution, three years before Philippe Cuénoud. He teaches at Imperial College London. Savolainen was elected fellow and the 2006 recipient of the Bicentenary Medal awarded by the Linnean Society. In 2009, the Royal Society of Biology granted Savolainen fellowship. Following his election as a member of the European Molecular Biology ...
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#4513

Aron Moscona

#92879
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Aron Arthur Moscona was an American developmental biologist who studied how embryos develop, and how the undifferentiated cells within the developing embryo interact with each other and form into the tissues and organs of a living entity.
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#4514

Purnell W. Choppin

#85129
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Purnell Whittington Choppin was an American virologist. He served on the faculty of Rockefeller University for nearly thirty years, becoming the Leon Hess Professor of Virology. He moved to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1985, became the president of the institute in 1987, and retired in 1999, succeeded by Thomas Cech. Until his death in 2021, he was the chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Center for the Study of Hepatitis C, supported by a university consortium consisting of Rockefeller, Weill Cornell Medical College, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
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#4515

Karl Gottlieb Grell

#79037
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Karl Gottlieb Grell was a German zoologist and protistologist, known for his work on Trichoplax. Karl Grell received his doctorate in 1934 from the University of Bonn, for a dissertation on the digestive tract of the common scorpionfly . Subsequently, he worked primarily on unicellular eukaryotes and the metazoan Placozoa. During the World War II, he was assigned to an anti-malarial unit in southeast Europe.
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#4516

Martin C. J. Maiden

#90890
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Martin Christopher James Maiden is an English microbiologist. He is Professor of Molecular Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, where he is also a fellow of Hertford College. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in 2010, a Fellow of the Society of Biology in 2012, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology, both in 2016.
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#4517

Ewa Paluch

#73887
Overall Influence
Ewa Paluch is a French-Polish biophysicist and cell biologist. She is the 17th Professor of Anatomy in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.
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#4518

Edward Kravitz

#55081
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Edward Arthur Kravitz is the George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He is widely recognized for demonstrating that gamma-aminobutyric acid functions as a neurotransmitter. In addition, he and Antony Stretton were the first to use the intracellular dye procion yellow to visualize neuronal architecture. Later, Kravitz's work with neuroamines demonstrated that serotonin and octopamine act as synaptic modulators. Kravitz continued to explore the function of amines using Homarus americanus, the American lobster, as a model organism to study aggression. He current...
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#4519

Satish K. Gupta

#53511
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Satish Kumar Gupta is an Indian immunologist and an Emeritus Scientist at the National Institute of Immunology. Known for his research in reproductive immunology, Gupta is an elected fellow of all the three Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, India and Indian National Science Academy He is also a J. C. Bose Fellow of the Department of Biotechnology and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded hi...
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#4520

Pauline Ladiges

#86497
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Pauline Yvonne Ladiges is a botanist whose contributions have been significant both in building the field of taxonomy, ecology and historical biogeography of Australian plants, particularly Eucalypts and flora, and in science education at all levels. She is professorial fellow in the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne, where she has previously held a personal chair and was head of the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne from 1992 to 2010. She has been a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science since 2002.
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#4521

Bartha Knoppers

#52249
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bartha Maria Knoppers, OC OQ is a Canadian law Professor and an expert on the ethical aspects of genetics, genomics and biotechnology. Born in Hilversum, Netherlands, she received a Bachelor of Arts from McMaster University , a Master of Arts degree in comparative literature from the University of Alberta , Bachelor of Common Law and Civil Law degrees from McGill University, where she was selected as an Executive Editor for the McGill Law Journal, a Diploma of Legal Studies from University of Cambridge , and a Doctorate of Laws from the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne .  In additio...
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#4522

Merry Lindsey

#81491
Overall Influence
Merry L. Lindsey is an American cardiac physiologist. She is the Stokes-Shackleford Professor and Chair of the University of Nebraska Medical Center Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology and the director of the Center for Heart and Vascular Research. In 2021, Lindsey was appointed editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Physiology. Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
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#4523

Herbert W. Virgin

#93976
Overall Influence
Herbert W. "Skip" Virgin was the Edward Mallinckrodt Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology & Immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for establishing murine norovirus as a model system for studying norovirus biology, for identifying host phenotypes associated with persistent viral infections, for defining alterations to the human virome in the context of different diseases, and for elucidating the roles of autophagy and interferon-stimulated genes during viral infection.
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#4524

Walter Wahli

#94456
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Walter Wahli is a Swiss biologist and a professor at the University of Lausanne and at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. His research has contributed to the understanding of the control of metabolism by regulation of gene expression. He is known for working on the nuclear receptors, Peroxisome proliferator-activated Receptors, known as PPARs, involved in the energy balance of the body.
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#4525

Melvin I. Simon

#95300
Overall Influence
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#4526

Giacomo Bernardi

#83412
Overall Influence
Giacomo Bernardi is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California Santa Cruz. He earned his B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. at the University of Paris and did post-doctoral work from 1991 to 1994 at Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University.
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#4527

Jonathan L. Haines

#95344
Overall Influence
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#4528

Merete Nordentoft

#95368
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
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#4529

James C. Carrington

#89756
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
James C. Carrington is a plant biologist and the current president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. In 2005 he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 2008 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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#4530

Abraham Z. Snyder

#95374
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
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#4531

Winifred Watkins

Winifred Watkins
#65916
Overall Influence
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
Winifred May Watkins, FRS was a British biochemist and academic. She worked at the Imperial College School of Medicine. Early life Watkins was born on 6 August 1924 in Shepherd's Bush, London, England. Her father worked as an engraver but he was an artist in his spare time. She took to science after she won a scholarship to The Godolphin and Latymer School for Girls in Hammersmith. In 1939 the whole school was evacuated from London with no forward planning for where the school would stay. Watkins returned to London after a year.
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#4532

Oliver Payne Pearson

Oliver Payne Pearson
#81693
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Oliver Payne Pearson , or "Paynie" to many that knew him, was an American zoologist and ecologist. Over a very active 50-year career, he served as professor of zoology at UC Berkeley and curator of mammals at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Pearson is best known for his work on the role of predation on vole demography and population cycles, and for his piercing contributions to the biology of South American mammals, but his earlier studies on reproductive and physiological ecology are highly regarded as well.
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#4533

Jaqueline Goés de Jesus

#25577
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Jaqueline Góes de Jesus is a Brazilian scientist and researcher. She was part of the team which sequenced the Zika virus. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was a member of the team responsible for sequencing the first genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Brazil.
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#4534

Ralph A. Reisfeld

#95395
Overall Influence
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#4535

Yoshitaka Nagahama

#95400
Overall Influence
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#4536

Michael Hasselmo

#76342
Overall Influence
Michael Hasselmo is an American neuroscientist and professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. He is the director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience and is editor-in-chief of Hippocampus . Hasselmo studies oscillatory dynamics and neuromodulatory regulation in cortical mechanisms for memory guided behavior and spatial navigation using a combination of neurophysiological and behavioral experiments in conjunction with computational modeling. In addition to his peer-reviewed publications, Hasselmo wrote the book How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Ep...
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#4537

Sarah Ratner

Sarah Ratner
#61955
Overall Influence
1903 - 1999 (96 years)
Sarah Ratner was an American biochemist. Her contributions to the study of nitrogen metabolism led to a better understanding of human disorders in urea synthesis. In 1961, Ratner was awarded the Garvan–Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974.
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#4538

Francis V. Chisari

#93406
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Francis "Frank" Vincent Chisari is a physician, experimental pathologist, virologist, and immunologist, known for his research on virus-host interactions of hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Education and career Chisari graduated in 1963 with a bachelor's degree in biology from Fordham University and in 1968 with an M.D. from Cornell University's Weill Medical College. He was in 1970 and 1971 a fellow in anatomic pathology at the Mayo Clinic and in 1972 a staff associate in immunopathology at the NIH's Laboratory of Pathology. In 1973 he completed his residency in internal medicine at Dartmouth Medical School.
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#4539

Vadim N. Gladyshev

#81337
Overall Influence
Vadim N. Gladyshev is a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, who specializes in antioxidant biology. He is known for his characterization of the human selenoproteome. He is also known for his work on the effects of aging in humans. He has conducted studies on whether organisms can acquire cellular damage from their food; the role selenium plays as a micro-nutrient with significant health benefits; In 2013 he won the NIH Pioneer Award.
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#4540

Olaf Schneewind

#94814
Overall Influence
1961 - 2019 (58 years)
Olaf Schneewind was a German-born American microbiologist who made important contributions to the study of bacterial cell wall composition and assembly as well as the pathogenesis of the microbial species S. aureus. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
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#4541

Peter Høj

#33078
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Peter Bordier Høj is a Danish-Australian academic and Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Adelaide. He has previously served as Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Queensland and the University of South Australia. Educated at the University of Copenhagen, Høj completed a Bachelor of Science where he majored in biochemistry and chemistry, a Master of Science in biochemistry and genetics and a Doctor of Philosophy in Photosynthesis. He has worked in Denmark and Australia as a researcher and published multiple scientific articles. Høj has also served on a number o...
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#4542

Sophia Frangou

#48065
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sophia Frangou is a professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where she heads the Psychosis Research Program. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and vice-chair of the RCPsych Panamerican Division. She is a Fellow of the European Psychiatric Association and of the American Psychiatric Association . She served as vice-president for Research of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders from 2010 to 2014. She has also served on the Council of the British Association for Psychopharmacology. She is founding member of the EPA NeuroImaging sectio...
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#4543

Leigh W. Simmons

#95516
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
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#4544

Fabiola León-Velarde

#55771
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Fabiola León-Velarde Servetto is a Peruvian physiologist who has devoted her research to the biology and physiology of high altitude adaptation. Born in Lima, Peru. She is the daughter of Carlos Leon-Velarde Gamarra and Juana Servetto Marti from Uruguay, and granddaughter of Angelica Gamarra. Under the mentorship of high altitude physiologist Carlos Monge Cassinelli, she obtained a BSc. in Biology , an MSc and DSc in physiology at Cayetano Heredia University in Lima, Perú.
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#4545

Susumu Ohno

#95528
Overall Influence
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#4546

Robin Chazdon

#92152
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Robin Lee Chazdon is an American tropical ecologist. She is a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Early life and education Chazdon was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1957. While attending Kenwood High School, she participated on their swimming team. During high school, she became aware of environmental problems and gravitated toward studying ecology. As a result, Chazdon enrolled at Grinnell College with the goal of becoming a plant ecologist and field biologist. She was advised by her academic advisor to join a field study program in Costa Rica, which she did from January–June 1976.
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#4547

Michael J. Tyler

#78489
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Michael J. Tyler dubbed "The Frog Man", was an Australian herpetologist and academic, noted for his research on frogs and toads, chiefly with the University of Adelaide. History Tyler was born in Britain, and early developed an interest in herpetology. While working as a volunteer at the British Museum, he was advised to go to Australia and Papua New Guinea if he wanted to do any ground-breaking research on amphibians. Around 1958–1959 he hitch-hiked to Australia.
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#4548

William G. Scott

#95559
Overall Influence
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#4549

Seth Grant

#58766
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Seth Grant is an Australian neuroscientist and Professor of Molecular Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He previously worked as a principal investigator at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England. He is known for his research on the biological basis of brain diseases. He was elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. He is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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#4550

Makoto Asashima

#17699
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
is a Japanese developmental biologist known for his pioneer research on Activin. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo and Yokohama City University. He is also Vice President of the Tokyo University of Science.
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