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 Medical,
#51
Fiona Wood
#9072
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Fiona Melanie Wood is an Australian plastic surgeon and burns specialist working in Perth, Western Australia. She is the director of the Royal Perth Hospital burns unit and the Western Australia Burns Service, and developed spray-on skin in collaboration with Marie Stoner. In addition, Wood is also a clinical professor with the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Western Australia and director of the Fiona Wood Foundation .
Go to Profile#52
Maurice Edmond Müller
#8666
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Maurice Edmond Müller was a Swiss orthopedic surgeon who was instrumental in the development of internal fixation techniques to treat bone fractures and who also significantly advanced the development of the hip prostheses. For his work in these areas he has been honored with numerous awards. On 24 August 2002, the International Society of Orthopaedic Surgery and Traumatology named him the "Orthopedic Surgeon of the Century" at a congress in San Diego.
Go to Profile#53
Alvan Feinstein
#13326
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
Alvan R. Feinstein was an American clinician, researcher and an epidemiologist who made significant impact on clinical investigation, especially on the field of clinical epidemiology that he helped define. He is regarded as one of the fathers of modern clinical epidemiology. He died at the age of 75 in Toronto on 25 October 2001 and is survived by his wife and two children.
Go to Profile#54
William B. Kannel
#18432
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
William B. Kannel was a former director of the Framingham Heart Study and a former head of the American Heart Association's Council of Epidemiology. He was among the recipients of the 1976 Gairdner Foundation International Award. He coined the term "risk factor", which first appeared in a 1961 article in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Go to Profile#55
Joy Bauer
#12016
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Joy L. Bauer, MS, RDN , is the host of NBC's "Health & Happiness" and the health and nutrition expert on The Today Show. Bauer is the author of 15 bestsellers. Bauer is a monthly columnist for Woman's Day and the official nutritionist for the New York City Ballet. She was formerly the co-host of the RLTV show "Good Food, Good Deeds."
Go to Profile#56
Jan Lindhe
#17430
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Jan Lindhe is a Swedish periodontist and a clinical research scientist specializing in periodontology. Education & career Lindhe graduated from the Royal School of Dentistry in Malmö, Sweden. He completed specialty training in oral surgery and periodontology at the University of Lund. He began his career as a professor of roentgenology in 1957 at Lund. The title of his 1964 doctoral thesis at Lund was Orthogonal cutting of dentine: a methodological study. He then became assistant professor of periodontology in 1964. In 1967, after spending 6 years studying oral radiology, oral surgery and pe...
Go to Profile#57
Alfred G. Gilman
#3696
Overall Influence
1941 - 2015 (74 years)
Alfred Goodman Gilman was an American pharmacologist and biochemist. He and Martin Rodbell shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells."
Go to Profile#58
E. Donnall Thomas
#4042
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Edward Donnall "Don" Thomas was an American physician, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, and director emeritus of the clinical research division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In 1990 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Joseph E. Murray for the development of cell and organ transplantation. Thomas and his wife and research partner Dottie Thomas developed bone marrow transplantation as a treatment for leukemia.
Go to Profile#59
Dennis S. Charney
#12249
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Dennis S. Charney is an American biological psychiatrist and researcher, with expertise in the neurobiology and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders. He is the author of Neurobiology of Mental Illness, The Physician's Guide to Depression and Bipolar Disorders and Molecular Biology for the Clinician, as well as the author of over 600 original papers and chapters. In 2022, he was listed #52 on Research.com's "Top Medicine Scientists in the United States," with an h-index of 194 with 146,109 citations across 651 publications. Charney is known for demonstrating that ketamine is effective for treating depression.
Go to Profile#60
Frank Hu
#11884
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Frank B. Hu is a Chinese American nutrition and diabetes researcher. He is Chair of the Department of Nutrition and the Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#61
Chris Whitty
#6072
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Sir Christopher John MacRae Whitty is a British epidemiologist, serving as Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government since 2019. Whitty was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department of Health and Social Care and Head of the National Institute for Health and Care Research from 2016 to 2021. He was also the Acting Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2017 to 2018. He is emeritus Gresham Professor of Physic.
Go to Profile#62
Donald Henderson
#7920
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Donald Ainslie Henderson was an American medical doctor, educator, and epidemiologist who directed a 10-year international effort that eradicated smallpox throughout the world and launched international childhood vaccination programs. From 1977 to 1990, he was Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Later, he played a leading role in instigating national programs for public health preparedness and response following biological attacks and national disasters. At the time of his death, he was Professor and Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Pro...
Go to Profile#63
David Colquhoun
#4689
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
David Colquhoun is a British pharmacologist at University College London . He has contributed to the general theory of receptor and synaptic mechanisms, and in particular the theory and practice of single ion channel function. He held the A.J. Clark chair of Pharmacology at UCL from 1985 to 2004, and was the Hon. Director of the Wellcome Laboratory for Molecular Pharmacology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985 and an honorary fellow of UCL in 2004. Colquhoun runs the website DC's Improbable Science, which is critical of pseudoscience, particularly alternative medicine, a...
Go to Profile#64
Majid Samii
#8755
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Majid Samii is an Iranian neurosurgeon and medical scientist. Biography Samii was born in Tehran, Iran on 19 June 1937. After having completed his high school education in Iran, he moved to Germany, where he started his medical studies at the University of Mainz.
Go to Profile#65
Graham Colditz
#14866
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Graham Andrew Colditz MD, DrPH is an Australian chronic disease epidemiologist. He is the inaugural Niess-Gain Professor at Washington University School of Medicine, where he is associate director for Prevention and Control at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center. He directs the Master of Population Health Science at Washington University School of Medicine. During medical training he was excited by the potential for prevention of chronic diseases. With encouragement from mentors he pursued training in the US as it was routine for academics in Australia to obtain overseas training at that time.
Go to Profile#66
William R. Brody
#4233
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
William Ralph Brody is an American radiologist and academic administrator. He was the President of The Johns Hopkins University, a position which he held from 1996 to 2009 before becoming the President of the Salk Institute from 2009 to 2015.
Go to Profile#67
Ömer Özkan
#14821
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Ömer Özkan is a Turkish plastic surgeon. An associate professor at the Akdeniz University in Antalya, he led the team that performed in 2012 the first full face transplant in Turkey. Education He finished in 1988 Cumhuriyet High School in Ankara. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at the Hacettepe University in 1995, he completed his special studies in plastic and reconstructive surgery between 1995 and 2001 at the same university.
Go to Profile#68
Alfred Sommer
#12108
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Alfred Sommer is a prominent American ophthalmologist and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research on vitamin A in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that dosing even mildly vitamin A deficient children with an inexpensive, large dose vitamin A capsule twice a year reduces child mortality by as much as 34 percent. The World Bank and the Copenhagen Consensus list vitamin A supplementation as one of the most cost-effective health interventions in the world.
Go to Profile#69
Valery Shumakov
#18772
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Valery Ivanovich Shumakov was a Russian surgeon and transplantologist, famous for being the founding father of organ transplants in Russia and was a pioneer of artificial organ surgery. Career Shumakov began his medical career by researching blood flow during congenital heart disorder operations.
Go to Profile#70
Ruth Huenemann
#13017
Overall Influence
Ruth Lois Huenemann was an American public health nutritionist. She was a pioneer in the study of childhood obesity. Huenemann was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and she was the chair of the Department of Social and Administrative Health Sciences in the School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#71
Ernest Beutler
#17290
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Ernest Beutler was a German-born American hematologist and biomedical scientist. He made important discoveries about the causes of a number of diseases, including anemias, Gaucher disease, disorders of iron metabolism and Tay–Sachs disease. He was also among the first scientists to identify X-inactivation as the genetic basis of tissue mosaicism in female mammals, and pioneered a number of medical treatments, including bone marrow transplantation techniques. Beutler was the Chairman of Medicine at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, CA from 1959 until 1979 and served as a Professor, t...
Go to Profile#72
Arthur Earl Walker
#13003
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Arthur Earl Walker was a Canadian-born American neurosurgeon, neuroscientist and epileptologist remembered for the eponymous syndromes Dandy–Walker syndrome, Dandy–Walker-like syndrome and Walker–Warburg syndrome. During his career he published over 400 research articles and 8 books.
Go to Profile#73
Hanna Damasio
#4743
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Hanna Damasio is a scientist in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, she has developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory, and emotion, using both the lesion method and functional neuroimaging. She is currently a Dana Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#74
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#912
Overall Influence
1909 - 2012 (103 years)
Rita Levi-Montalcini was an Italian neurobiologist. She was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with colleague Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor . From 2001 until her death, she also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life. This honor was given due to her significant scientific contributions. On 22 April 2009, she became the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of 100, and the event was feted with a party at Rome's City Hall.
Go to Profile#75
David A. Kessler
#10315
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
David Aaron Kessler is an American pediatrician, attorney, author, and administrator serving as Chief Science Officer of the White House COVID-19 Response Team since 2021. Kessler was the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from November 8, 1990, to February 28, 1997. He co-chaired the Biden-Harris transition’s COVID-19 Advisory Board from November 2020 to January 2021 and was the head of Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government program to accelerate the development of COVID-19 vaccines and other treatments, from January to February 2021.
Go to Profile#76
David L. Katz
#18373
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
David L. Katz is an American physician, nutritionist and writer. He was the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center that was founded at Griffin Hospital in 1998. Katz is the founder of True Health Initiative and is an advocate of plant-predominant diets.
Go to Profile#77
Peter Hotez
#11304
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Peter Jay Hotez is an American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology, and neglected tropical disease control. He serves as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics, and University Professor of Biology at Baylor College of Medicine.
Go to Profile#78
Edward Giovannucci
#21981
Overall Influence
Edward L. Giovannucci is a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Cancer Causes & Control.
Go to Profile#79
Howard Maibach
#23607
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Howard I Maibach is an American dermatologist, professor of Dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco . His major contributions include seminal work in wound management, and extensive work in patient care, dermatophysiology, dermatophamacology, and dermatotoxicology. In 2013, he was awarded the "Master Dermatologist Award" by the American Academy of Dermatology for his outstanding contributions to the practice and teaching of Dermatology.
Go to Profile#80
Henri Ford
#12838
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Henri Ronald Ford is a Haitian-American pediatric surgeon. He previously served as chief of surgery at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and Vice Dean for Medical Education at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. In 2018, he was appointed dean of the University of Miami's Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Ford returned to Haiti to provide medical assistance to earthquake victims.
Go to Profile#81
Sandro Galea
#19946
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Sandro Galea is a physician, epidemiologist, and author. He is the Robert A. Knox professor and dean at the Boston University School of Public Health. He is the former Chair of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Galea is past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2012, chairing two of the organization's reports on mental health in the military. He formerly served as chair of the New York City Department of Health and Menta...
Go to Profile#82
Shiv Kumar Sarin
#18226
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Shiv Kumar Sarin is an Indian gastroenterologist, hepatologist, translational scientist, researcher and teacher. He set up the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences. He is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize and the Padma Bhushan. He served as chairman of the Board of Governors of Medical Council of India. He was the president of the Asian Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver and founder of Asian Pacific School of Hepatology.
Go to Profile#83
Philip J. Landrigan
#13774
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Philip John Landrigan , is an American epidemiologist and pediatrician and one of the world's leading advocates of children's health. His work has been recognized by national non-profit organization Healthy Child Healthy World and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency , and he is included in New York Magazine's list of "Best Doctors 2008."
Go to Profile#84
Don Francis
#11978
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Donald Pinkston Francis is an American epidemiologist who worked on the Ebola outbreak in Africa in the late 1970s, and as an HIV/AIDS researcher. He retired from the U.S. Public Health Service in 1992, after 21 years of service. He lives in San Francisco, California.
Go to Profile#85
Ara Darzi, Baron Darzi of Denham
#11143
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Ara Warkes Darzi, Baron Darzi of Denham, is an Armenian-British surgeon, academic, and politician. Lord Darzi is an academic surgeon and holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College London, specialising in the field of minimally invasive and robot-assisted surgery, having pioneered many new techniques and technologies. He is co-director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and the NIHR Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre at Imperial College London. He has become strongly identified with trying to change the National Health Service in England and is re...
Go to Profile#86
Julius Axelrod
#25651
Overall Influence
#87
Peter Libby
#25423
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Peter Libby is an American physician, focusing in atherosclerosis, cardiology and preventive cardiology, currently the Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Go to Profile#88
Gertrude B. Elion
#2999
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design for the development of new drugs. This new method focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error. Her work led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Her well known works also include the development of the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used t...
Go to Profile#89
Mary G. Enig
#14939
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Mary Gertrude Enig was a nutritionist and researcher known for her unconventional positions on the role saturated fats play in diet and health. She promoted skepticism towards the consensus in the scientific and medical communities that diets high in saturated fats can contribute to development of heart disease, while she advocated for a diet based on whole foods and rich in certain saturated fats.
Go to Profile#90
Loren Cordain
#12301
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Loren Cordain is an American scientist who specializes in the fields of nutrition and exercise physiology. He is notable as an advocate of the Paleolithic diet. Education Loren Cordain obtained a B.S. in Health Sciences from Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon in 1972. In 1978 he got his M.Sc. in Exercise Physiology at the University of Nevada-Reno. In 1981 he was awarded his Ph.D. in Exercise Physiology by the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
Go to Profile#91
Jerry Morris
#20919
Overall Influence
1910 - 2009 (99 years)
Jeremiah Noah Morris was a Scottish epidemiologist who established the importance of physical activity in preventing cardiovascular disease. Early life Morris was born on 6 May 1910 in Liverpool. His Jewish family had emigrated to escape pogroms in Poland. Arriving by boat in Liverpool, the family adopted the surname of the ship's captain. His family moved to Glasgow, where Jerry was brought up in poverty. His childhood experiences of Glasgow's slums informed his later work, and led to his membership of the Labour Party which he joined at the age 16, and only left when in his nineties in his disgust at the Second Gulf War.
Go to Profile#92
James Q. Miller
#14403
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
James Q. Miller, MD was an American neurologist and educator in neurology based at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Early life and education He was born James Quinter Miller in Ohio. His undergraduate education was at Haverford College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and his medical degree from the Columbia Medical School in New York City. He was one of the first neurology residents at the Department of Neurology of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. He received additional training in neuropathology, genetics, and child neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#93
Julie Gerberding
#11362
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Julie Louise Gerberding is an American infectious disease expert who was the first woman to serve as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . As of May 2022, she is the CEO of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health . Gerberding grew up in Estelline, South Dakota, attended Brookings High School, and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Case Western Reserve University. She was the chief medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco where she treated hospitalized AIDS patients in the first years of the epidemic. Gerberding be...
Go to Profile#94
Ioannis Pallikaris
#18817
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Ioannis G. Pallikaris is a Greek ophthalmologist who in 1989 performed the first LASIK procedure on a human eye. Pallikaris also developed Epi-LASIK. Professor Palikaris was the rector of the University of Crete between 2003 and 2011. He is also the founder and director of the Institute of Vision and Optics in the same university.
Go to Profile#95
Matthias Egger
#19637
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Matthias Egger is professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Bern in Switzerland, as well as professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#96
Dennis J. Selkoe
#23208
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Dennis J. Selkoe is an American physician known for his research into the molecular basis of Alzheimer's disease. In 1985 he became Co-Director of the Center for Neurological Diseases and from 1990, Vincent and Stella Coates Professor of Neurological Diseases at Harvard Medical School. He is also a Fellow of the AAAS and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#97
C. David Marsden
#24890
Overall Influence
1938 - 1998 (60 years)
David Marsden , FRS was a British neurologist who made a significant contribution to the field of movement disorders. He was described as ‘arguably the leading academic neurologist and neuroscientist of his generation in the UK’.
Go to Profile#98
Daniel Bovet
#3113
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Daniel Bovet was a Swiss-born Italian pharmacologist who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of drugs that block the actions of specific neurotransmitters. He is best known for his discovery in 1937 of antihistamines, which block the neurotransmitter histamine and are used in allergy medication. His other research included work on chemotherapy, sulfa drugss, the sympathetic nervous system, the pharmacology of curare, and other neuropharmacological interests.
Go to Profile#99
Joseph B. Martin
#12366
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Joseph Boyd Martin is a Canadian physician who is the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Prior to that, he served as the Dean of Harvard Medical School from 1997 before stepping down on June 30, 2007.
Go to Profile#100
Louis S. Goodman
#14927
Overall Influence
1906 - 2000 (94 years)
Louis Sanford Goodman was an American pharmacologist. He is best known for his collaborations with Alfred Gilman, Sr., with whom he authored the popular textbook The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics in 1941 and pioneered the first chemotherapy trials using nitrogen mustard.
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