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,
#1
Oliver Sacks
#202
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
Oliver Wolf Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. Born in London, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles . Later, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades.
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C. Everett Koop
#728
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Charles Everett Koop was an American pediatric surgeon and public health administrator who served as the 13th surgeon general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989. According to the Associated Press, "Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name" due to his frequent public presence around the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
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Albert Sabin
#1262
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Albert Bruce Sabin was a Polish-American medical researcher, best known for developing the oral polio vaccine, which has played a key role in nearly eradicating the disease. In 1969–72, he served as the president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
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David Gorski
#962
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David Henry Gorski is an American surgical oncologist and professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He specializes in breast cancer surgery at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. Gorski is an outspoken skeptic and critic of alternative medicine and the anti-vaccination movement. A prolific blogger, he writes as Orac at Respectful Insolence, and as himself at Science-Based Medicine where he is the managing editor.
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Walter Willett
#4615
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Walter C. Willett is an American physician and nutrition researcher. He is the Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and was the chair of its department of nutrition from 1991 to 2017. He is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
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Sanjay Gupta
#1434
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Sanjay Gupta is an American neurosurgeon, medical reporter, and writer. He serves as associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, associate professor of neurosurgery at the Emory University School of Medicine, member of the National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the chief medical correspondent for CNN.
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Richard Doll
#2227
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll was a British physician who became an epidemiologist in the mid-20th century and made important contributions to that discipline. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill and Evarts Graham, he was credited with being the first to prove that smoking increased the risk of :lung cancer and :heart disease.
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Atul Gawande
#1659
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Atul Atmaram Gawande is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally. On June 20, 2018, Gawande was n...
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Magdi Yacoub
#3392
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub , is an Egyptian retired professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College London, best known for his early work in repairing heart valves with surgeon Donald Ross, adapting the Ross procedure, where the diseased aortic valve is replaced with the person's own pulmonary valve, devising the arterial switch operation in transposition of the great arteries, and establishing the heart transplantation centre at Harefield Hospital in 1980 with a heart transplant for Derrick Morris, who at the time of his death was Europe's longest-surviving heart transplant recipient. Y...
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Ancel Keys
#2029
Overall Influence
1904 - 2004 (100 years)
Ancel Benjamin Keys was an American physiologist who studied the influence of diet on health. In particular, he hypothesized that replacing dietary saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced cardiovascular heart disease. Modern dietary recommendations by health organizations, systematic reviews, and national health agencies corroborate this.
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John Vane
#2828
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Sir John Robert Vane was a British pharmacologist who was instrumental in the understanding of how aspirin produces pain-relief and anti-inflammatory effects and his work led to new treatments for heart and blood vessel disease and introduction of ACE inhibitors. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 along with Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson for "their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances".
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Frances Oldham Kelsey
#1978
Overall Influence
1914 - 2015 (101 years)
Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey was a Canadian-American pharmacologist and physician. As a reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration , she refused to authorize thalidomide for market because she had concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug's safety. Her concerns proved to be justified when it was shown that thalidomide caused serious birth defects. Kelsey's career intersected with the passage of laws strengthening FDA oversight of pharmaceuticals. Kelsey was the second woman to receive the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, awarded to her by John F.
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Ferid Murad
#1441
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ferid Murad was an American physician and pharmacologist, and a co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Early life Ferid Murad was born in Whiting, Indiana, on September 14, 1936. His parents were Henrietta Josephine Bowman of Alton, Illinois, and Xhabir Murat Ejupi, an Albanian immigrant from Gostivar in present-day North Macedonia. who subsequently changed his name to John Murad after being processed at Ellis Island in 1913. His mother was from a Baptist family and ran away from home in 1935, aged 17, to marry his father, who was 39 and Muslim. Murad is the oldest of three boys.
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Ben Goldacre
#1564
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Ben Michael Goldacre is a British physician, academic and science writer. He is the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. He is a founder of the AllTrials campaign and OpenTrials to require open science practices in clinical trials.
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Joycelyn Elders
#2716
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Minnie Joycelyn Elders is an American pediatrician and public health administrator who served as Surgeon General of the United States from 1993 to 1994. A vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, she was the second woman, second person of color, and first African American to serve as Surgeon General.
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T. Colin Campbell
#3595
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Thomas Colin Campbell is an American biochemist who specializes in the effect of nutrition on long-term health. He is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University.
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Robert J. White
#4409
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Robert Joseph White was an American neurosurgeon best known for his head transplants on living monkeys. Biography White was raised in Duluth, Minnesota, by his mother and an aunt. His father was killed in combat while serving in the Pacific theater during World War II. White stated in a 2009 Motherboard interview that his interest in the human brain started in high school when his biology teacher admired his dissection of a frog cranium and told White that he should become a brain surgeon.
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Shinya Yamanaka
#1157
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Shinya Yamanaka is the director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (iPS – induced Pluripotent Stem Cell), senior investigator for the J. David Gladstone Institutes, a professor for Kyoto University’s Institute for Frontier Medical Services, and a professor of anatomy for the University of California at San Francisco. He studied at Osaka Kyoiku University before earning his M.D. at Kobe University and his Ph.D. from Osaka City University Graduate School. He completed a residency in orthopedic surgery at National Osaka Hospital and a postdoctoral fellowship for the J. David Gladstone Institutes of Cardiovascular Disease.
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Steven Novella
#1700
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Steven Paul Novella is an American clinical neurologist and associate professor at Yale University School of Medicine. Novella is best known for his involvement in the skeptical movement as a host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast and as the president of the New England Skeptical Society. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry .
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Frank Jobe
#7057
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Frank James Jobe was an American orthopedic surgeon and co-founder of the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic. Jobe pioneered both elbow ligament replacement and major reconstructive shoulder surgery for baseball players.
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Stanley B. Prusiner
#1911
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Stanley Ben Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco . Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for prion research developed by him and his team of experts beginning in the early 1970s.
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Eric Topol
#5039
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Eric Jeffrey Topol is an American cardiologist, scientist, and author. He is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a professor of Molecular Medicine and Executive Vice-President at Scripps Research Institute, and a senior consultant at the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. He is editor-in-chief of Medscape and theheart.org. He has published three bestseller books on the future of medicine: The Creative Destruction of Medicine , The Patient Will See You Now , and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again .
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Michael Marmot
#5136
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sir Michael Gideon Marmot is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. He is currently the Director of The UCL Institute of Health Equity. Marmot has led research groups on health inequalities for over thirty years, working for various international and governmental bodies. In 2023, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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Valentín Fuster
#5301
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Valentín Fuster Carulla, 1st Marquess of Fuster is a Spanish cardiologist and aristocrat. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology , past President of the American Heart Association, past President of the World Heart Federation, and has been a member of the US National Academy of Medicine and Member of the European Horizon 2020 Scientific Panel of Health. In 2016 he co-chaired, with Jendayi Frazer, the Advisory Committee on The Role of the United States on Global Health.
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Maria Siemionow
#9631
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Maria Siemionow is a Polish transplant surgeon and scientist. She is known for leading a team of eight surgeons through the first near-total face transplant performed in the United States at the Cleveland Clinic in 2008. The patient, Connie Culp, a 45-year-old woman from a small town in Ohio, was exceedingly disfigured by a close range shotgun blast in 2004. The procedure took 22 hours.
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Elias Zerhouni
#2975
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Elias Zerhouni is an Algerian-born American scientist, radiologist and biomedical engineer. He spent much of his career on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, serving as its executive vice-dean from 1995 to 2002. He was the 15th Director of the National Institutes of Health from May 2, 2002, to October 31, 2008, under the George W. Bush administration. In 2009, under the Obama administration he served as one of the country's first presidential science envoys to foster scientific and technologic collaboration with other nations. He also served as a senior fellow for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from 2009 through 2010.
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Marion Nestle
#4308
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Marion Nestle is an American molecular biologist, nutritionist, and public health advocate. She is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health Emerita at New York University. Her research examines scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice, obesity, and food safety, emphasizing the role of food marketing.
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Avedis Donabedian
#6316
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Avedis Donabedian was a physician and founder of the study of quality in health care and medical outcomes research, most famously as a creator of The Donabedian Model of care. Early life Avedis Donabedian was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in an Armenian family from Western Armenia. Although the rest of his parents' families perished from the Armenian genocide, Donabedian's immediate family was able to escape, ultimately migrating to Palestine. His father had qualified as a doctor at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and soon after set up practice in the small Christian town of Ramallah, near Jerusalem.
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Ulana Suprun
#4887
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Ulana Nadia Suprun is a Ukrainian-American physician, activist, and philanthropist who served as the acting Minister of Healthcare from 2016 to 2019. Prior to her government career, Suprun served as Director of Humanitarian Initiatives for the Ukrainian World Congress.
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Garth Fisher
#10483
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Garth Fisher , is an American plastic surgeon best known as the first doctor selected for the ABC television show Extreme Makeover. Fisher's clientele includes entertainers, celebrities and business executives and he specializes in aesthetic/cosmetic plastic surgery of the face, nose, breast and other parts of the body.
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Salvador Moncada
#6287
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Sir Salvador Enrique Moncada Seidner, FRS, FRCP, FMedSci is a Honduran pharmacologist and professor. He is currently Research Domain Director for Cancer at the University of Manchester. In the past, he was the Research Director of the Wellcome Research Laboratories from 1986 to 1995 and, until recently, the Director of the UCL Wolfson Institute, which he established at University College London in 1996. His research interests include inflammation and vascular biology and he is currently working on the regulation of cell proliferation. He gained fame for his discoveries related to nitric oxide...
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Richard Peto
#7539
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir Richard Peto is an English statistician and epidemiologist who is Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, England. Education He attended Taunton's School in Southampton and subsequently studied the Natural Sciences Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge followed by a Master of Science degree in Statistics at Imperial College London.
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Gazi Yaşargil
#4296
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Mahmut Gazi Yaşargil is a Turkish medical scientist and neurosurgeon. He collaborated with Raymond M. P. Donaghy M.D at the University of Vermont in developing microneurosurgery. Yaşargil treated epilepsy and brain tumours with instruments of his own design. From 1953 until his retirement in 1993 he was first resident, chief resident and then professor and chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery, University of Zurich and the Zurich University Hospital. In 1999 he was honored as "Neurosurgery’s Man of the Century 1950–1999" at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons Annual Meeting. He is a founding member of Eurasian Academy.
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Robert F. Spetzler
#12134
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert F. Spetzler is a neurosurgeon and the J.N. Harber Chairman Emeritus of Neurological Surgery and director emeritus of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. He retired as an active neurosurgeon in July 2017. He is also Professor of Surgery, Section of Neurosurgery, at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, Arizona.
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David Khayat
#8440
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
David Khayat is a French oncologist. Head of the Department of Medical Oncology at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital since 1990, he is also Professor of oncology at the University Pierre and Marie Curie and adjunct Professor at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. He was elected at the American Society of Clinical Oncology board in 2013. Organiser of the World Summit against Cancer at the UNESCO, he initiated the Charter of Paris against Cancer and headed the French Cancer National Institute between April 2004 and September 2006. He is its Honorary President now. Professor Khayat is ...
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Salim Yusuf
#11679
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Salim Yusuf is an Indian-born Canadian physician, the Marion W. Burke Chair in Cardiovascular Disease at McMaster University Medical School. He is a cardiologist and epidemiologist. Yusuf has criticized the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and disputes the scientific consensus on dietary sodium and saturated fat intake.
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Thomas Borody
#10117
Overall Influence
Thomas J. Borody is an Australian gastroenterologist. In the 1980s Borody contributed to development of a treatment for Helicobacter pylori. During the COVID-19 pandemic he became embroiled in controversy for advocating an ivermectin-based purported "cure" for COVID-19 without transparently declaring his financial interest in it.
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Louis Lasagna
#8847
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Louis Cesare Lasagna was an American physician and professor of medicine, known for his revision of the Hippocratic Oath. Early life and education Lasagna was an internationally recognized and respected expert in clinical pharmacology. Born in Queens, New York in 1923, Lasagna was raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey, by his Italian immigrant parents, and graduated from New Brunswick High School. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1943 and earned his medical degree from Columbia University in 1947. During his time at Rutgers University, he joined Kappa Sigma Fraternity . After completing ...
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Richard E. Besser
#7636
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Richard E. Besser is an American doctor and executive who has served as president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation since April 2017. Besser served as the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry from January to June 2009. He was ABC News' former chief health and medical editor. Besser is a brother-in-law to Scottish singer Annie Lennox.
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George Davey Smith
#12321
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
George Davey Smith is a British epidemiologist. He has been professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Bristol since 1994, honorary professor of public health at the University of Glasgow since 1996, and visiting professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine since 1999.
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David L. Heymann
#10731
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
David L. Heymann is an American infectious disease epidemiologist and public health expert, based in London. Early life and education Heymann was born in Pennsylvania, USA. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Pennsylvania State University and later obtained an MD from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He also received a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Heymann did two years of practical epidemiology training with the Epidemic Intelligence Service, during which time Heymann was part of the international team that inve...
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Peter Piot
#5100
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sir Peter Karel, Baron Piot, is a Belgian-British microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS. After helping discover the Ebola virus in 1976 and leading efforts to contain the first-ever recorded Ebola epidemic that same year, Piot became a pioneering researcher into AIDS. He has held key positions in the United Nations and World Health Organization involving AIDS research and management. He has also served as a professor at several universities worldwide. He is the author of 16 books and over 600 scientific articles.
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Michael R. Harrison
#10219
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michael R. Harrison served as division chief in pediatric surgery at the Children's Hospital at the University of California, San Francisco for over 20 years, where he established the first fetal treatment center in the U.S. He is often referred to as the father of fetal surgery. He is currently a professor of surgery and pediatrics and the director emeritus of the UCSF Fetal Treatment Center.
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Nikolai Amosov
#6422
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Nikolai Mikhailovich Amosov, Doctor of Science, Professor , also known as Mykola Mykhailovych Amosov was a Soviet and Ukrainian doctor, heart surgeon, inventor, best-selling author, and exercise enthusiast, known for his inventions of several surgical procedures for treating heart defects.
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David E. Nichols
#4270
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David Earl Nichols is an American pharmacologist and medicinal chemist. Previously the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology at Purdue University, Nichols has worked in the field of psychoactive drugs since 1969. While still a graduate student, he patented the method that is used to make the optical isomers of hallucinogenic amphetamines. His contributions include the synthesis and reporting of escaline, LSZ, 6-APB, 2C-I-NBOMe and other NBOMe variants , and several others, as well as the coining of the term "entactogen".
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David Sackett
#8409
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
David Lawrence Sackett was an American-Canadian physician and a pioneer in evidence-based medicine. He is known as one of the fathers of Evidence-Based Medicine. He founded the first department of clinical epidemiology in Canada at McMaster University, and the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. He is well known for his textbooks Clinical Epidemiology and Evidence-Based Medicine.
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Mehmet Haberal
#6370
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Mehmet Haberal , is the founder of Başkent University in Ankara, Turkey, best known for becoming the first transplant surgeon in Turkey after leading the team that performed Turkey's first living-related kidney transplant in 1975, after he returned from surgical training under the mentorship of American surgeon Thomas Starzl, with whom he also performed some of the longest surviving early liver transplantations.
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David Nutt
#3488
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
David John Nutt is an English neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in the research of drugs that affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety, and sleep. He is the chairman of Drug Science, a non-profit which he founded in 2010 to provide independent, evidence-based information on drugs. Until 2009, he was a professor at the University of Bristol heading their Psychopharmacology Unit. Since then he has been the Edmond J Safra chair in Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit in the Division of Brain Sciences there. Nut...
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Jay Bhattacharya
#5918
Overall Influence
Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya is an Indian American professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the economics of health care.
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David Moher
#17082
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
David Moher is an Irish epidemiologist and senior scientist in the Clinical Epidemiology Program at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute , where he is also Director of the for Journalology, and the Canadian EQUATOR Centre. He is also an associate professor and University Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. An expert on systematic reviews in medical science, he played a major role in the development of both the PRISMA and CONSORT statements. He is a co-editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Systematic Reviews. He has been recognised as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher, and recei...
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