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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Medical,
#701
Christos Socrates Mantzoros
#68187
Overall Influence
Christos Socrates Mantzoros is a Greek American physician-scientist, practicing internist-endocrinologist, teacher and researcher. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an adjunct professor at Boston University School of Medicine. He currently serves as the chief of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at the VA Boston Healthcare System, where he created de novo a leading academic division true to its tripartite mission and as the founding director of human nutrition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center , Harvard Medical School. Finally, he holds the editor-in-chief ...
Go to Profile#702
Samuel Berkovic
#71808
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Professor Samuel Frank Berkovic is an Australian neurologist and Laureate Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne and Director of the Epilepsy Research Centre at Austin Health.
Go to Profile#703
Peter A. Singer
#36633
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Peter Alexander Singer, OC, FRSC, is special advisor to the director general of the World Health Organization, and also adjunct professor of medicine at University of Toronto. From 2008-2018 Singer was chief executive officer of Grand Challenges Canada and Director of the Sandra Rotman Centre, University Health Network. From 1996-2006 Singer was director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics.
Go to Profile#704
John Buse
#40265
Overall Influence
John B. Buse is the Verne S. Caviness Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine . He is also the director of UNC's Diabetes Care Center and the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute. In 2008, he held the position of President, Medicine & Science on the board of the American Diabetes Association .
Go to Profile#705
Darrick E. Antell
#41715
Overall Influence
Darrick E. Antell, MD, F.A.C.S. is an American scientist, researcher, educator and plastic and reconstructive surgeon. As of 2023, he is Assistant Clinical Professor of Surgery at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He was the first in his field to use twins to document how faces can be affected by environmental factors like sun, stress, and smoking.
Go to Profile#706
George Karpati
#63432
Overall Influence
1934 - 2009 (75 years)
George Karpati, was a Canadian neurologist and neuroscientist who was one of the leading experts on the diagnosis and treatment of neuromuscular disorders including muscular dystrophy research. Born in Debrecen, Hungary, Karpati was a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Canada in 1957. He received an M.D. from Dalhousie University in 1960. Karpati spent 30 years in clinical practise, research and teaching of neurology. He was the Izaak Walton Killam Chair and Professor of Neurology at McGill University.
Go to Profile#707
Ian Norman
#35592
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Ian James Norman is a British nursing researcher and author, based in Surrey, UK. His research and writing is focused primarily in the fields of psychiatric and mental health nursing, and psychological treatments for people with mental health difficulties. Norman is Emeritus Professor of Mental Health in the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care at King's College London. He is a former Executive Dean of Faculty and Assistant Principal at King's. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Nursing Studies and a practising cognitive behavioural psychotherapist.
Go to Profile#708
John Crump
#31433
Overall Influence
John Andrew Crump MB ChB, MD, DTM&H, FRACP, FRCPA, FRCP is a New Zealand-born infectious diseases physician, medical microbiologist, and epidemiologist. He is Professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Global Health at the University of Otago and an adjunct professor of medicine, Pathology, and Global Health at Duke University. He served as inaugural co-director of the Otago Global Health Institute, one of the university's research centres. His primary research interest is fever in the tropics, focusing on invasive bacterial diseases and bacterial zoonoses.
Go to Profile#709
Earl S. Ford
#79242
Overall Influence
#710
Neal Krause
#68038
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Neal Krause is Marshall H. Becker Collegiate Professor of Public Health at University of Michigan School of Public Health, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Biography & awards Krause was born on December 15, 1948, in Mineola, New York. Krause obtained a baccalaureate degree from the University of Oklahoma , a master's degree in sociology and psychology from Sam Houston State University , and a doctorate in sociology . From 1982 to 1986, Krause worked at the University of Texas Medical Branch as Research Associate, Research Instructor, and assistant professor. In 1986 he joined the Department of Health ...
Go to Profile#711
Frederick Andermann
#62562
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Frederick Andermann was a Canadian neurologist and epileptologist. Biography He was born and initially raised in Chernivtsi, belonging at that time to Romania, today Ukraine. When this area was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, his family first moved to Bucharest, then to Switzerland and France , before they immigrated to Canada in 1950, where he trained in medicine at the Université de Montréal and then neurology at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital.
Go to Profile#712
Michael Swash
#79476
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
#713
Devi Sridhar
#56060
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (41 years)
Devi Lalita Sridhar FRSE is an American public health researcher, who is both professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research considers the effectiveness of public health interventions and how to improve developmental assistance for health. Sridhar directs the University of Edinburgh's Global Health Governance Programme which she established in 2014.
Go to Profile#714
Arthur Scott Walters
#69818
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Arthur Scott Walters is an American neurologist, a professor of neurology at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Research Walters' research interests have focused on the nexus where sleep disorders and movement disorders meet. He is co-editor of the first book on sleep-related movement disorders in 2003 and is author on over 200 research publications.
Go to Profile#715
Elizabeth Pisani
#48908
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Elizabeth Pisani is a British-American epidemiologist, public health consultant, author and journalist. She is an academic researcher and the director of Ternyata Ltd., a public health consultancy based in London, UK. Her research investigates the ways in which politics, economics and culture influence public health. This has included markets for substandard and falsified medicines and HIV. Before this, Pisani was a journalist who worked as a correspondent for Reuters in several Asian countries.
Go to Profile#716
James Chin
#76732
Overall Influence
James Chin is a public health epidemiologist. He works in public health surveillance and prevention of communicable diseases, particularly AIDS. Career Chin was an international research fellow with the Hooper Foundation, UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco and the Institute for Medical Research, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 1961–1964, and a research epidemiologist at the California State Viral and Rickettsial Diseases Laboratory, Berkeley and Fort Ord, California from 1964–1967.
Go to Profile#717
David W. Hein
#62840
Overall Influence
David W. Hein is an American professor and scientist. He currently is a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of Louisville where he serves as the Peter K. Knoefel Endowed Chair of Pharmacology and Professor & Chair of the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology.
Go to Profile#718
Pedro L. Alonso
#69280
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Pedro L. Alonso , is a physician, epidemiologist, and researcher in diseases that affect vulnerable populations. Based on a multidisciplinary approach, his work focuses mainly on malaria, although he has also studied other infectious diseases. He served as the Director of the Global Malaria Programme at the World Health Organization between 2014 and 2022, and is currently Professor of Global Health at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Science-Hospital Clinic, at the University of Barcelona.
Go to Profile#719
Sung Wan Kim
#36857
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Sung Wan Kim was a South Korean-American academic who worked as a distinguished professor of pharmaceutics and pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Utah. He is the founder and co-director of the University of Utah's Center for Controlled Chemical Delivery.
Go to Profile#720
Patricia D'Amore
#68426
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Patricia Ann D'Amore is a professor at Harvard Medical School, where she is the Charles L. Schepens Professor of Ophthalmology, and Professor of Pathology. Early life and career D'Amore grew up in Everett, Massachusetts and graduated from Matignon High School in Cambridge. After a 1973 BA at Regis College , she received a PhD in biology at Boston University in 1977 under the direction David Shepro.
Go to Profile#721
Syra Madad
#45030
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (39 years)
Syra Madad is an American pathogen preparedness expert and infectious disease epidemiologist. Madad is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the executive leadership team which oversees New York City's response to the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the city's 11 public hospitals. She was featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and the Discovery Channel documentary The Vaccine: Conquering COVID.
Go to Profile#722
John Krakauer
#45863
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
John Krakauer is an American neurologist and neuroscientist. He is currently the John C. Malone Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, the Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement laboratory, co-founder of the KATA project at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Head of Vision for MindMaze. His areas of interest range from motor learning, motor control, and stroke to bioethics. From 2003 until 2010, he was the codirector of the Motor Performance Laboratory at the Neurological Institute of Columbia University. He received his bachelor's degree at Trinity College of Cambridge University.
Go to Profile#723
Donald Lloyd-Jones
#62447
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Donald M. Lloyd-Jones is an American epidemiologist who is currently the Eileen M. Foell Professor at Northwestern University. Education He earned his M.D. at Columbia University in 1991. Research His interests are preventative medicine, cardiology and aging. His highest cited paper is "Heart disease and stroke statistics" at 6043 times, according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#724
Peter H. Lin
#60692
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Peter Lin is an American vascular surgeon, medical researcher, specializing in minimally invasive endovascular treatment of vascular disease. He has published extensively in the area of vascular surgery and endovascular surgery.
Go to Profile#725
Donna Spiegelman
#77747
Overall Influence
Donna Spiegelman is a biostatistician and epidemiologist who works at the interface between the two fields as a methodologist, applying statistical solutions to address potential biases in epidemiologic studies.
Go to Profile#726
Timothy Billiar
#79998
Overall Influence
Timothy R. Billiar is an American surgeon currently the George Vance Foster Endowed Professor and Distinguished Professor of Surgery at University of Pittsburgh. His current research includes immune, cell and organ biology.
Go to Profile#727
Gereon Rudolf Fink
#80017
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
#728
Imad Sarsam
#78904
Overall Influence
Imad Sarsam was an orthopaedic surgeon. His qualifications included the FRCS , D.Sc and M.B.Ch.B. External links The Effect of Tensile Forces on Shoulder Capsule Integrity, poster presentation at the 2004 9th International Congress on Surgery of the Shoulder Meeting, organised by the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons, May 2-May 3, 2004
Go to Profile#729
Dimitri Kullmann
#53881
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Dimitri Michael Kullmann is a professor of neurology at the UCL Institute of Neurology, University College London , and leads the synaptopathies initiative funded by the Wellcome Trust. Kullmann is a member of the Queen Square Institute of Neurology Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy and a consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
Go to Profile#730
R. William Field
#36250
Overall Influence
R. William Field is an academic scholar and Professor in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health and Department of Epidemiology within the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa. He received a BS and MS degree in Biology from Millersville University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Preventive Medicine from the College of Medicine at the University of Iowa in 1994. Field is currently an occupational and environmental epidemiologist as well as an internationally recognized expert on the measurement and health effects of radon gas.
Go to Profile#731
René Prêtre
#67552
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
René Prêtre is a Swiss pediatric heart surgeon at the University Hospital of Lausanne. He has performed thousands of surgeries on children's hearts. Early life and education Prêtre was born into a family of farmers in the countryside of Canton Jura, as one of seven siblings. His father was a farmer and a Jurassian independence activist who was summoned five times before a judge. Prêtre learned to work with his hands and to repair farm machinery. His grandfather was a watchmaker.
Go to Profile#732
Ben Cowling
#78890
Overall Influence
Benjamin John Cowling is a British epidemiologist and medical statistician. He is the current Chair Professor of Epidemiology and Head of the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong .
Go to Profile#733
Susan Mackinnon
#80173
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Susan Mackinnon is a Canadian plastic and reconstructive surgeon who is a pioneer in the field of peripheral nerve transfer and regeneration. She performed the world's first nerve allotransplantation in 1988. She is a past president of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, the Plastic Surgery Research Council, and the American Association of Hand Surgery. As of 2022, she is the Minot Packer Fryer Professor of Plastic Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, United States.
Go to Profile#734
Éric Fombonne
#77895
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Éric Fombonne MD, FRCP, is a French psychiatrist and epidemiologist based in Montreal. Career Fombonne trained in Paris and was subsequently appointed as a career research scientist in Paris, at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale . In the early 1990s, he joined Pr. Rutter's MRC Child Psychiatry Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London where he held a Senior Lecturer post and an Honorary Consultant position at the Maudsley Hospital. In 1997, he was promoted as Reader In Epidemiological Psychiatry at the Institute of psychiatry. In 2001, he was appointed at McGill University in Canada as tenured full professor in Psychiatry.
Go to Profile#735
Patrick J. Kelly
#67713
Overall Influence
Patrick J. Kelly, FACS, is a neurosurgeon in New York City. He is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at New York University School of Medicine. He has operated on almost 7,000 brain tumors and is considered an authority in the fields of brain tumor surgery, stereotactic neurosurgery and computer application in neurosurgery.
Go to Profile#736
Peter Valent
#73954
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Peter Valent is an Austrian hematologist and stem cell researcher. Since 1990 he leads a research group at the Medical University of Vienna. From 2002 he coordinates the European Competence Network on Mastocytosis and since 2008 he is Scientific Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Hematology and Oncology of the Ludwig Boltzmann Society in Austria.
Go to Profile#737
Ralph Wesley Phillips
#80610
Overall Influence
#738
Allen Wilcox
#79480
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Allen James Wilcox is an American epidemiologist who heads the reproductive epidemiology group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences . Education Wilcox received his BA degree from the University of Michigan in 1968 and his MD from the University of Michigan Health System in 1973. He later received both his MPH and PhD from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health in 1976 and 1979, respectively.
Go to Profile#739
Warren Winkelstein
#61865
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Warren Winkelstein Jr. was an American epidemiologist, professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. During the 1960s Winkelstein was considered one of the leading epidemiologists of the time.
Go to Profile#740
Kári Stefánsson
#36130
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Kári Stefánsson is an Icelandic neurologist and founder and CEO of Reykjavik-based biopharmaceutical company deCODE genetics. In Iceland he has pioneered the use of population-scale genetics to understand variation in the sequence of the human genome. His work has focused on how genomic diversity is generated and on the discovery of sequence variants impacting susceptibility to common diseases. This population approach has served as a model for national genome projects around the world and contributed to the realization of several aspects of precision medicine.
Go to Profile#741
Mervyn Gotsman
#60250
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Mervyn S. Gotsman is Professor Emeritus of Cardiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel. Biography Mervyn Samuel Gotsman was born in 1935 in the town of Hermanus in South Africa to Benjamin, a physicist, and Ada, a housewife. The family originally came to South Africa from Lithuania, with an intermediate station in England.
Go to Profile#742
Robert B. Daroff
#58714
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Robert Barry Daroff is a pioneer of ocular motor research. He is a neurologist in Cleveland, Ohio, connected to University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. He is also Professor and Chair Emeritus of Neurology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#743
Robert J. Genco
#81144
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
#744
Lisa Bodnar
#53690
Overall Influence
Lisa Bodnar is an American nutritional and perinatal epidemiologist. She is the Vice-Chair for Research and a tenured professor at University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the contributions of pregnancy weight gain, dietary patterns, maternal obesity, and maternal vitamin D deficiency to adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes.
Go to Profile#745
Ilona Kickbusch
#27916
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Ilona Kickbusch is a German political scientist best known for her contribution to health promotion and global health. She is adjunct professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva.
Go to Profile#746
Emmanuel Quaye Archampong
#56628
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Professor Emmanuel Quaye Archampong, was a Ghanaian surgeon and academic. He was an emeritus professor of the College of Health Sciences University of Ghana Medical School, University of Ghana, Legon.
Go to Profile#747
David C. Christiani
#75683
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
David C. Christiani is an American physician, specializing in the molecular epidemiology of cancer. He is currently the Elkan Blout Professor of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he is also the Director of the Harvard Education and Research Center for Occupational Safety and Health. His specialty is Molecular Epidemiology of cancer.
Go to Profile#748
William L. Mcguire
#81531
Overall Influence
#749
Walter Orenstein
#72034
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Walter A. Orenstein served as the director of the United States' National Immunization Program, from May 1993 to January 2004. Education Orenstein has a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York. He went on to receive his MD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1972. He then completed a residency in pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, after which he completed a fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Southern California Medical School. Orenstein then completed another residency, this time in preventive medicine at the Centers for Dise...
Go to Profile#750
Donald Dafoe
#44650
Overall Influence
Donald Christian Dafoe is an American surgeon and research scientist. Biography The eldest son of a surgeon, Dafoe graduated from Appleton West High School in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1967, where he was on the football and wrestling teams. He then attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his undergraduate degree in zoology and his medical degree.
Go to Profile