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,

#4751

Kerry-Jayne Wilson

#70174
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Kerry-Jayne Wilson was a New Zealand biologist and lecturer in ecology at Lincoln University in the Faculty of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Work As an undergraduate, Wilson spent the summer of 1969–1970 in the Snares Islands, working as an assistant to the Australian ornithologist and photographer John Warham. She was struck by the huge numbers of sooty shearwaters , penguins, petrels, and prions, and seabirds later became her research focus. She earned a Master of Science degree at the University of Canterbury, and was appointed a faculty member at Lincoln College in 1986.
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#4752

Roger Alistair Barker

#97973
Overall Influence
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#4753

Liise-anne Pirofski

#86236
Overall Influence
Liise-anne Pirofski is a Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center. She is a Member of the Association of American Physicians, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Microbiology, American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
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#4754

Ronald Hetzer

#98011
Overall Influence
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#4755

Geoffrey Raisman

#67502
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Professor Geoffrey Raisman FRS was a British neuroscientist. Personal life He was born in Leeds and died in London. His parents were Harry and Celia Raisman, both also born in Leeds. Geoffrey's grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. He describes his family's story in his book, The Undark Sky. Raisman was not religious. He attended Roundhay School and Pembroke College, Oxford.
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#4756

Vincent G. Allfrey

#98012
Overall Influence
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#4757

Evgeny Nudler

#47219
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Evgeny Nudler is an American biochemist, currently the Julie Wilson Anderson Professor at New York University School of Medicine. He is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is best known for his pioneering work on the molecular mechanisms of transcription elongation and termination, mechanisms of cellular adaptation to genotoxic and proteotoxic stress, as well as his role in the discovery of riboswitches and RNA polymerase backtracking.
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#4758

John J. Wiens

#98082
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
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#4759

Guenter Neumann

Guenter Neumann
#80516
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Guenter Neumann is an agricultural scientist at the University of Hohenheim. He is a plant physiologist specialising in rhizosphere research and scientific coordinator of the EU Research Project Biofector.
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#4760

John M. Hayes

John M. Hayes
#41536
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
John Michael Hayes was an American oceanographer. He worked at Indiana University Bloomington, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Education Hayes was educated at Iowa State University graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1962. He completed his postgraduate education in analytical chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was awarded a PhD in 1966 for analysis of organic constituents of terrestrial and extraterrestrial samples using mass spectrometry supervised by Klaus Biemann.
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#4761

Terry Orr-Weaver

#79240
Overall Influence
Terry L. Orr-Weaver is an American molecular biologist in the MIT Department of Biology with a joint appointment to the Whitehead Institute. She does research on developmental biology, with a focus on "[c]oordination of cell growth and division with development, with particular focus on the oocyte-to-embryo transition, control of cell size, and regulation of metazoan DNA replication." Orr-Weaver and her collaborators have identified two proteins necessary for the proper sorting of chromosomes during meiosis with implications for cancer and birth defects. In 2006 she was elected to the National...
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#4762

David T. Denhardt

#98143
Overall Influence
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#4763

George R. Breese

#98155
Overall Influence
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#4764

Anthony Segal

#69437
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Anthony Segal FRS FMedSci is a British physician/scientist. Education He was educated at the University of Cape Town and University of London . Fellow of: UCL, Royal College of Physicians, The College of Medicine of South Africa
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#4765

Sam W. Heads

#84197
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Sam W. Heads is a British palaeontologist, a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, as well as a former Officer and Editor-in-Chief at the Orthopterists' Society.
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#4766

R. H. Miller

#98188
Overall Influence
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#4767

Hashim Al-Hashimi

#81007
Overall Influence
Hashim Al-Hashimi is a professional biochemist and professor of biochemistry and chemistry at Duke University. He received the prestigious NAS Award in Molecular Biology in 2020.
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#4768

Wallace H. Clark Jr.

#56522
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Wallace H. Clark Jr. was an American dermatologist and pathologist. He is best known for devising the "Clark's level", or Clark Level, system for classifying the seriousness of a malignant melanoma skin cancer based on its microscopic appearance.
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#4769

Jonathan F. Wendel

#98198
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
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#4770

Thomas Ms Wolever

#98202
Overall Influence
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#4771

Maria Byrne

#98175
Overall Influence
Maria Byrne is an Australian marine biologist, and professor of marine and developmental biology at the University of Sydney and a member of the Sydney Environment Institute. She spent 12 years as director of the university's research station on One Tree Island.
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#4772

Marion Leboyer

#61250
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Marion Leboyer is a French psychiatrist, university professor and hospital practitioner at the Paris-Est Créteil University . Biography After completing her medical studies at Paris Descartes University, a master's degree and a PhD in science at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, and being appointed intern at the Paris hospitals in 1981, she was head of clinic at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital from 1989 to 1994. From 2002 to 2007, she was head of the sectorized psychiatry department at Albert Chenevier Hospital and of the psychiatry department at Henri Mondor Hospital in 2002 before being appointed head of the psychiatry division there.
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#4773

Gordon Elliott Fogg

#91184
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Gordon Elliott Fogg was a British biologist. Early life He was born in Langar, Nottinghamshire and educated at Dulwich College and Queen Mary College, London. Career During WW2 he assisted in a national survey of seaweed resources and researched algae used to make water-soluble silk for parachutes to drop mines at sea. He also worked on pest control for Pest Control Ltd at Harston.
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#4774

David G. Heckel

#93982
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David G. Heckel is an American entomologist. Scientific career After studying biology and mathematics at the University of Rochester, New York, he finished his undergraduate studies with a BA in biology & mathematics in 1975. He received his PhD in biological sciences from Stanford University in 1980. From 1980 until 1999 he worked as an Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Clemson University, South Carolina. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Canberra, Australia, from 1996 until 1997. Since 1999 he was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, until he became a Director...
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#4775

Erin Schuman

#77326
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Erin Margaret Schuman, born May 15, 1963, in California, US, is a neurobiologist who studies neuronal synapses. She is currently a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. Career Erin Schuman attended the University of Southern California , where she received her B.A. in Psychology . She continued her education to obtain a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Princeton University . She conducted postdoctoral research from 1990–1993 in Daniel V. Madison’s lab in the Molecular and Cellular Physiology Department at Stanford University. From there, Schuman was recruited to join the faculty i...
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#4776

Kirk Winemiller

#92239
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Kirk O. Winemiller is an American ecologist, known for research on community ecology, life history theory, food webs, aquatic ecosystems, tropical ecology and fish biology. A strong interest of his has been convergent evolution and patterns, causes and consequences of biological diversity, particularly with respect to fishes. His research also has addressed the influence of hydrology on the ecological dynamics of fluvial ecosystems and applications of this knowledge for managing aquatic biodiversity and freshwater resources in the United States and other regions of the world. He currently ...
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#4777

Robert D. Rosenberg

#98236
Overall Influence
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#4778

Jurgen Ruesch

#34811
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Jurgen Ruesch was an American psychiatrist. Life Jurgen Ruesch was born in Naples, Italy, to Swiss parents. He studied at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and moved to San Francisco in 1943 to head a project at the newly opened Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute of the University of California, San Francisco. He remained as professor at the University of California until his retirement in 1977; he also maintained a private psychiatric practice.
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#4779

Jorge Dubcovsky

#93050
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jorge Dubcovsky is a plant geneticist and biologist at the University of California, Davis. He is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dubcovsky's research focuses on wheat genomics. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2014, Dubcovsky won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture alongside Leif Andersson.
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#4780

John Charles Priscu

John Charles Priscu
#83539
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
John C. Priscu , is a Romanian-American scientist who is the current Professor of Ecology in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at Montana State University. He is a principal investigator in the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research project.
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#4781

Harold Loesch

Harold Loesch
#86977
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Harold Carl Otto Loesch was a marine biologist and oceanographer who is credited with being the first to examine the Mobile Bay jubilee in an paper Much of his career was as an academic holding a professorship in the Department of Marine Sciences at Louisiana State University, though he also spent many years working for the United Nations agencies UNESCO and FAO to develop fisheries in newly industrialized countries. His principal areas of research were shrimp, copepods, and commercial fisheries development.
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#4782

Etsuo Niki

#98257
Overall Influence
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#4783

Eugene Paykel

#93899
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Eugene Stern Paykel is a British psychiatrist. He is known for his research work on depression, clinical psychopharmacology and social psychiatry over more than 40 years. Early life and education Paykel was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and received his medical degree at the University of Otago Medical School, Dunedin, followed by training in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital London.
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#4784

Henry S. Fitch

#88439
Overall Influence
1909 - 2009 (100 years)
Henry Sheldon Fitch was an American herpetologist. Fitch was born in Utica, New York. When he was a year old, the family moved to Medford in the Rogue Valley in Oregon. Growing up, he had a keen interest in all the reptiles he could find on his father's ranch. He recounts that he especially liked snakes, because "the real bonus was in seeing horrified adults scatter."
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#4785

Otto Westphal

#98301
Overall Influence
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#4786

Joseph Pedlosky

#86896
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Joseph Pedlosky is an American physical oceanographer. He is a scientist emeritus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Pedlosky was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1985. He is the author of the textbooks Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Ocean Circulation Theory, and Waves in the Ocean and Atmosphere: Introduction to Wave Dynamics.
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#4787

Judson A. Brewer

Judson A. Brewer
#32128
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Judson Alyn Brewer is an American psychiatrist, neuroscientist and author. He studies the neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI, and has translated research findings into programs to treat addictions. Brewer founded MindSciences, Inc. , an app-based digital therapeutic treatment program for anxiety, overeating, and smoking. He is director of research and innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center and associate professor in behavioral and social sciences in the Brown School of Public Health, and in psychiatry at Brown's Warren Alpert Medical School.
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#4788

Kristen Harris

#83269
Overall Influence
Kristen Harris is Professor of Neuroscience and Fellow in the Center for Learning and Memory at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research group at UT Austin uses serial section electron microscopy to study synapses. She is also a member of the Institute for Neuroscience and the Center for Theoretical and Computational Learning.
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#4789

Chris R. Somerville

#93236
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Christopher Roland Somerville is a Canadian-American biologist known as a pioneer of Arabidopsis thaliana research. Somerville is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and a Program Officer at the Open Philanthropy Project.
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#4790

Peter Propping

#69843
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Peter Propping was a German human geneticist. The scientific work of Propping spans genetically complex diseases, especially affecting brain function such as alcoholism, manic depressive disorders, schizophrenia, epilepsy, and in addition hereditary cancer predispositions. He also studied the history of human genetics and eugenics. From 1984 to 2008 he was director of the Institute of Human Genetics of the University of Bonn.
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#4791

Brian Arthur Hemmings

#98369
Overall Influence
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#4792

Henry Nathaniel Andrews

#93875
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Henry Nathaniel Andrews, Jr. was an American paleobotanist recognized as an expert in plants of the Devonian and Carboniferous periods. He was a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1975. He was a professor at the Washington University in St. Louis from 1940 to 1964 and a paleobotanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden 1947 to 1964. From 1964 until his retirement 1975, Andrews worked at the University of Connecticut, where he served as head of the school's Botany de...
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#4793

David L. Braff

#98377
Overall Influence
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#4794

Adel. K. El‐naggar

#98379
Overall Influence
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#4795

George Stamatoyannopoulos

#83389
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
George Stamatoyannopoulos was a Greek geneticist who taught at the University of Washington. Born in Athens on 11 March 1934, Stamatoyannopoulos earned a medical degree and doctorate from the University of Athens. He began teaching at the University of Washington in 1964, and was appointed a full professor in 1973. Stamatoyannopoulos led the Division of Medical Genetics at UW from 1989 to 2005, succeeding the department's founder, Arno Motulsky, who had served since 1957. Stamatoyannopoulos served as president of the American Society of Hematology in 1992, and became the founding leader of th...
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#4796

Jere H. Mitchell

#98401
Overall Influence
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#4797

Graham A. R. Johnston

#98409
Overall Influence
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#4798

Susan Smalley

Susan Smalley
#54066
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Susan Smalley is an American behavioral geneticist, writer and activist. The co-author of Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness, she is the founder of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior , and professor emerita in the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA. Her research centers on the genetic basis of childhood-onset behavior disorders, such as ADHD, and the cognitive and emotional impact of mindfulness meditation on health and wellbeing. She has published more than 100 ...
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#4799

Hugo Critchley

#48483
Overall Influence
Hugo Critchley is a British professor of psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, a partnership of the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex. Early life and education Critchley spent childhood years in Blackburn, Lancashire. His father, Edmund Critchley, worked as a neurologist, and his mother, Mair Critchley, née Bowen, as a physician in nuclear medicine. Critchley went to the University of Liverpool, attaining degrees in Physiology and Medicine . After a period as a junior doctor in Walton and Fazakerley Hospitals, he pursued doctorate training, studying cross-moda...
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#4800

Johannes Kornhuber

Johannes Kornhuber
#65937
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Johannes Kornhuber is a German psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Life Kornhuber worked in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Würzburg, Germany, as Postdoctoral Fellow, Resident and Supervising Physician. In 1996 he obtained an appointment to a full professorship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he was Chairman of the Gerontopsychiatric Section. Since 2000, Kornhuber has been a full professor and chairman in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.
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