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 Philosophy,
#17551
John Milton Ward IV
#127234
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
John Milton Ward IV was a musicologist and scholar of Renaissance music, world music and folk music. He was the William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University from 1961 to 1985. Biography Ward's memories of growing up in Oakland included his father John Milton Ward II, a physician, treating survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Ward attended San Francisco Junior College, and then San Francisco State College. He received a Master of Music from the University of Washington in 1942, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1953 from New York University with a dissertation entitled The 'Vihuela de mano' and its Music .
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John Phillips
#143282
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
William John Phillips MC was an English actor. He is known for the role of Chief Superintendent Robins in the television series Z-Cars and for his work as a Shakespearean stage actor. Early life Phillips was born in Birmingham, Warwickshire in 1914, was educated at Oswestry and began his acting career at Birmingham Rep in the 1930s. During the Second World War, Phillips served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and was awarded the Military Cross.
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Talja Blokland
#97778
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Talja V. Blokland is a Dutch and German social scientist and urban researcher. She studied sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and was a PhD student in social sciences at the Amsterdam School for Social Research from 1994 to 1997, and at the New School University in 1996. After her PhD, she was a visiting scholar at Yale University and Manchester University. She was appointed as part-time Gradus Hendriks Professor in Community Development at Erasmus University and became a senior researcher and program director at the OTB Institute for Urban, Housing and Mobility Studies at the Delft University of Technology.
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Ernst Dieffenbach
1811 - 1855 (44 years)
Johann Karl Ernst Dieffenbach , also known as Ernest Dieffenbach, was a German physician, geologist and naturalist, the first trained scientist to live and work in New Zealand, where he travelled widely under the auspices of the New Zealand Company, returning in 1841–42 and publishing in English his Travels in New Zealand in 1843.
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Adriaan van den Spiegel
1578 - 1625 (47 years)
Adriaan van den Spiegel , name sometimes written as Adrianus Spigelius , was a Flemish anatomist born in Brussels. For much of his career he practiced medicine in Padua, and is considered one of the great physicians associated with the city. At Padua he studied anatomy under Girolamo Fabrici.
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Leonard Shlain
#55679
Overall Influence
1937 - 2009 (72 years)
Leonard Shlain was an American surgeon, writer, and inventor. He was chairperson of laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, and was an associate professor of surgery at University of California, San Francisco.
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Dana L. Suskind
#68683
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Dana L. Suskind is a Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center ; director of UChicago Medicine's Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant program; and founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago.
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Kate Lorig
#27511
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dr. Kate Lorig, Dr.P.H., is an American professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also the director of the Stanford Patient Education Research Center. She is known for her work on chronic disease and patient education, has published several books and peer-reviewed journal articles in those fields, and developed a peer-led self-management course for patients with chronic diseases. Lorig is herself a chronic disease patient, having been diagnosed with Gaucher's disease at the age of three.
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Huan Tan
40 BC - 32 (72 years)
Huan Tan was a Chinese philosopher, poet, and politician of the Western Han and its short-lived interregnum between AD9 and 23, known as the Xin Dynasty. Life Huan worked as an official under the administrations of Emperor Ai of Han , Wang Mang , the Gengshi Emperor , and Emperor Guangwu of Han . Huan was a close associate of the court astronomer and mathematician Liu Xin, as well as the author and poet Yang Xiong.
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Andreas Aurifaber
1514 - 1559 (45 years)
Andreas Aurifaber was a German physician of some repute, but through his influence with Albert of Brandenburg, last grand-master of the Teutonic Knights, and first Protestant duke of Prussia, became an outstanding figure in the controversy associated with Andreas Osiander whose daughter he had married.
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George Allman
1812 - 1898 (86 years)
George James Allman FRS FRSE was an Irish ecologist, botanist and zoologist who served as Emeritus Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University in Scotland. Life Allman was born in Cork, Ireland, the son of James C. Allman of Bandon, and received his early education at the Royal Academical Institution, Belfast. For some time he studied for the Irish Bar, but ultimately gave up law in favour of natural science. In 1843, he graduated in medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and in the following year was appointed professor of botany in that university, succeeding the botanist William Al...
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Christopher H. van Dyck
#133737
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Christopher H. van Dyck , is the Founder and Director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Unit at Yale University School of Medicine, where he is Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Neuroscience. His research uses brain imaging to learn about the progression of pathology in Alzheimer's disease, and to test potential new treatments for this disease.
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Knut-Olaf Haustein
#173760
Overall Influence
1934 - 2006 (72 years)
Knut-Olaf Haustein was a German physician best known for his work studying the effects of tobacco smoking.
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Alison Leary
#118396
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Alison Leary is a Chair of Healthcare & Workforce Modelling at London South Bank University. and a Senior Consultant, World Health Organization Human Resources for Health Group. She works on the modelling of private and public healthcare systems. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing and Queen's Nursing Institute.
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Richard Quain
1800 - 1887 (87 years)
Richard Quain was an English anatomist and surgeon, born at Fermoy, Ireland, a brother of Jones Quain. He studied medicine in London and in Paris. He was appointed demonstrator in 1828 and professor of anatomy in 1832 at the University of London , resigning in 1850, and assistant surgeon in 1834 and surgeon in 1848 to the North London Hospital, from which he resigned in 1866. He was president of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1868.
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Francesco Puccinotti
1794 - 1872 (78 years)
Francesco Puccinotti was an Italian pathologist. Puccinotti was born in Urbino and started his career as the main doctor in Recanati but moved on to Macerata where he became the director of the civil hospital. He went on to teach the history of medicine at the universities of Pisa and Florence. He was briefly named to the Italian Senate after the Risorgimento.
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Euricius Cordus
1486 - 1535 (49 years)
Euricius Cordus born Heinrich Ritze was a German humanist poet, physician, botanist and naturalist. He is considered one of the founders of botany in Germany. Cordus was born in Simtshausen near Marburg the youngest of thirteen children born to a miller. He was educated at Frankenberg / Eder as well as at Marburg. He became a teacher in Kassel from 1509 to 1511 and then as a rent clerk in Felsberg. He later went to Erfurt where he met Conrad Mutian. He received a master's degree in 1516 and became rector at the Saint Marien college. He moved to study medicine in 1519 and became a doctor in 1521 and practiced in Braunschweig.
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Patrick Manson
1844 - 1922 (78 years)
Sir Patrick Manson was a Scottish physician who made important discoveries in parasitology, and was a founder of the field of tropical medicine. He graduated from University of Aberdeen with degrees in Master of Surgery, Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Law. His medical career spanned mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and London. He discovered that filariasis in humans is transmitted by mosquitoes. This is the foundation of modern tropical medicine, and he is recognized with an epithet "Father of Tropical Medicine". This also made him the first person to show pathogen transmission by a blood-feeding arthropod.
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Miriam Braverman
#143426
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Miriam Ruth Gutman Braverman was an American librarian. She attended library school at Pratt Institute. She was part of the socialist movement in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s she set up libraries in Freedom Schools in Mississippi, and she worked at the Brooklyn Public Library beginning in 1964. She was also one of the founders of the American Library Association's Social Responsibilities Round Table, which was founded in 1969. She wrote a history of young adult services at three public libraries, titled Youth, Society and the Public Library . She was a leader in the fight which led to the American Library Association condemning the Vietnam War.
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Concepción Quiñones de Longo
#95123
Overall Influence
Concepción Quiñones de Longo is a Puerto Rican pediatrician and government official. She was the interim Secretary of Health of Puerto Rico in March 2020 and had previously served as the undersecretary of Rafael Rodríguez Mercado. Quiñones de Longo is a former faculty member of the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine.
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Robert Harris
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Robert Harris was a Welsh-born Canadian painter, most noted for his portrait of the Fathers of Confederation. Early life Born in Caerhun, Conwy, Wales, Robert Harris grew up on his father’s farm before moving to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in 1856. Encouraged by his mother, he developed an interest in art, and to practice drawing, he often sketched images from magazines. In 1867, he travelled to Liverpool, where he independently studied and sketched from the plaster casts in the local museum, learning human anatomy and proportion. Already skilled in portraiture, and receiving commiss...
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Robert Stewart MacDougall
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Robert Stewart MacDougall FRSE LLD was a Scottish entomologist, agriculturalist and zoologist. In authorship he appears as R. S. MacDougall. Life MacDougall was born in Edinburgh on 5 June 1862. He was educated at George Heriot's School then studied sciences at the University of Edinburgh graduating with an MA. He then began lecturing in Agricultural and Forest Zoology at the University of Edinburgh, before taking on the post of Professor of Biology at the Royal Dick Veterinary College in south Edinburgh.
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David Nicholl
#36955
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
David Nicholl is a neurologist, human rights activist, fundraiser for Amnesty International, and online columnist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. In March 2006 he initiated a letter in the medical journal The Lancet, signed by more than 250 medical experts, urging the United States to stop force-feeding at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and close down the prison camp. He is also a principal author of a reference work on neurological conditions
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Paolo Flores d'Arcais
#75856
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Paolo Flores d'Arcais is an Italian philosopher and journalist, editor of the magazine MicroMega. He contributes to Il Fatto Quotidiano, El País, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Gazeta Wyborcza.
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Roberto De Simone
#123900
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Roberto De Simone is an Italian stage director, playwright, composer and ethnomusicologist. Life and career Born in Naples, after graduating in piano and composition at the San Pietro a Maiella Conservatory De Simone started an intense concert activity, performing as an harpsichordist in the Domenico Scarlatti Orchestra. At the same time he started being active as an ethnomusical researcher and essayist, mainly focused on the southern Italy folk music of oral tradition, with also some interest in tarantism and funeral laments. In the second half of the 1960s he met some musicians who shared w...
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Daniel E. Freeman
#66244
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Daniel Evan Freeman is an American musicologist who specializes in European art music of the eighteenth century, in particular the musical culture of eighteenth-century Prague and the Bohemian lands. He is also active as a pianist and music editor.
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Torgny T:son Segerstedt
#64996
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Torgny T. Segerstedt was a Swedish philosopher and sociologist. Biography Torgny T. Segerstedt was born at Mellerud, in Holm parish, Älvsborg County, Sweden. He was the son of Torgny Segerstedt , scholar of comparative religion who taught at Lund University and publicist remembered especially for his uncompromising anti-Nazi stance. He grew up in Stockholm and from 1917, when his father became editor of Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, in Gothenburg.
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Erycius Puteanus
1574 - 1646 (72 years)
Erycius Puteanus was a humanist and philologist from the Low Countries. Name Erycius Puteanus is a latinization of his name, which was rendered in various ways, including Hendrick van den Putte , Errijck de Put or Eric van der Putte. This was also Latinized as Ericus Puteanus. He was also known as Henry du Puy.
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Burchard Mauchart
1696 - 1751 (55 years)
Burchard David Mauchart was professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and a pioneer in the field of ophthalmology. In 1748 he became one of the first to document the eye disorder now known as keratoconus. His surviving works are now to be found in the form of theses by his students.
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Gerolamo Accoramboni
1469 - 1537 (68 years)
Gerolamo Accoramboni is an Italian physician born in Gubbio in Umbria on February 1469 and died in Rome on 21 February 1537. Personal life Fourth son of Giovanni Filippo Accoramboni, he married Agnese Ubaldini with whom he had several children including:Fabio, jurist at the University of Padua.Claudio who married Tarquinia Paluzzi Albertoni in 1549: they had eleven children including Vittoria Accoramboni whose life will inspire Stendhal and John Webster .
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Kilian Stobæus
1690 - 1742 (52 years)
Kilian Stobæus was a Swedish physician, natural scientist, and historian. He offered a young Carl Linnaeus tutoring and lodging, as well as the use of his library, which included many books about botany. He also gave the student free admission to his lectures. In his spare time, Linnaeus explored the flora of Scania together with students sharing the same interests.
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Zbigniew Szafrański
#61443
Overall Influence
Zbigniew E. Szafrański is a Polish Egyptologist. Life Zbigniew Szafrański is the director of the Polish archeological mission to Egypt that has been working at Queen Hatshepsut's mortuary temple since 1961. He is known as the founder of the Polish school of Mediterranean Archaeology. He is a faculty member at the University of Warsaw, Department of History, and is deputy chief of the Mediterranean Archaeology Center. He has published numerous papers and writes on Egyptian history for popular magazines.
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Christine Montross
#104414
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Christine Elaine Montross is an American medical doctor and writer. First a published poet and a high school teacher, she later took up medical studies, and became an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University's Alpert Medical School. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Nadine Caron
#75801
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Nadine Rena Caron FACS, FRCSC, , is a Canadian surgeon. She is the first Canadian female general surgeon of First Nations descent , as well as the first female First Nations student to graduate from University of British Columbia's medical school.
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Leopold Ritter von Dittel
1815 - 1898 (83 years)
Leopold Ritter von Dittel was an Austrian urologist born in Fulnek, a community now located in the Czech Republic. Dittel received his medical doctorate in 1840 from the University of Vienna, and as a young man worked as a physician in Trentschin-Teplitz. From 1853 to 1857, he was an assistant to Johann von Dumreicher and a surgical assistant at the university hospital in Vienna. Later, he became surgeon-in-chief of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, and in 1865 attained the title of associate professor.
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Georg Joseph Beer
1763 - 1821 (58 years)
Georg Joseph Beer was an Austrian ophthalmologist. He is credited with introducing a flap operation for treatment of cataracts , as well as popularizing the instrument used to perform the surgery . Career Initially a theology student, in 1786 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna. Under the guidance of Joseph Barth , his primary focus turned to the field of ophthalmology. However, his professional relationship with Barth was never close, and he later referred to his years with Barth as his "years of torture" . The final break in their relationship was caused by Barth's...
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Raymond Heimbecker
#141058
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Raymond O. Heimbecker, was a Canadian cardiovascular surgeon who performed the world’s first complete heart valve transplant in 1962, and Canada’s first modern heart transplant in 1981 with anti-rejection drugs to prolong the patient's survival.
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Evan Adams
#85717
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Evan Tlesla Adams is an Indigenous Canadian actor, playwright, and physician. A Coast Salish from the Sliammon First Nation near Powell River, British Columbia, he is best known internationally for his roles in the films of Sherman Alexie, as Thomas Builds-the-Fire in the 1998 film Smoke Signals and Seymour Polatkin in the 2002 film The Business of Fancydancing.
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Virginia Lacy Jones
1912 - 1984 (72 years)
Virginia Lacy Jones was an American librarian who throughout her 50-year career in the field pushed for the integration of public and academic libraries. She was one of the first African Americans to earn a PhD in Library Science and became dean of Atlanta University's School of Library Sciences.
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Morrill Wyman
1812 - 1903 (91 years)
Morrill Wyman was an American physician and social reformer. Best known today for his work on hay fever, he was one of the most respected doctors of his time, a social reformer, Harvard overseer, hospital president, and author in his long lifetime.
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Mary Chiarella
#81125
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Elizabeth Mary Chiarella AM is an Australian academic who specialises in issues relating to nursing, midwifery and the law. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, Australia and has been at the forefront of many regulatory changes to nursing practice and the nursing workforce and midwifery. These include the introduction of nurse practitioners into Australia, the move from a state based to a national regulatory system and, for midwifery, the introduction of the world's first Doctor of Midwifery and the establishment of the framework for state funded home birth midwifery in New South Wales , Australia.
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Arnold Johnson
#116933
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Arnold Johnson, M.D., C.M., FRCPC, was a Canadian cardiologist and founder of the Department of Cardiology at McMaster University. He is most well known for performing the first heart catheterization procedure for congenital heart disease in Canada in 1946.
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#17594
Ruth Sanger
#61052
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Ruth Ann Sanger was an Australian immunogeneticist, haematologist and serologist. She was known for her work on human red cell antigens and for the genetic mapping of the human X chromosome. She was Director of the Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit, of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine from 1973 to 1983.
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André Schuiteman
#186141
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
André Schuiteman is a Dutch botanist in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London, United Kingdom, where he is the Research Leader for Asia in Plant Identification and Naming. Schuitemania, a genus of orchid, was named in his honour.
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William Blair-Bell
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
William Blair-Bell was a British medical doctor and gynaecologist who was most notable as the founder of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1929. Blair-Bell was considered the greatest gynaecologist of the 20th century, raising it from what was then a branch of general surgery into a separate medical specialism.
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Heraclides of Aenus
350 BC - 400 BC (-50 years)
Heraclides of Aenus was one of Plato's students. Around 360 BC, he and his brother Python assassinated Cotys I, the ruler of Thrace.
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Alfred Hoernlé
1880 - 1943 (63 years)
Reinhold Friedrich Alfred Hoernlé , usually referred to as Alfred Hoernlé, was a South African philosopher and social reformer. Early life Hoernlé was born in Bonn, Germany, and was the son of the Indologist A.F.R. Rudolf Hoernlé . His father was a missionary-scholar associated with the London Missionary Society and, therefore, Alfred was a British subject by birth.
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Vicki Sauter
#59258
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Vicki Lynn Sauter is an American management scientist and systems engineer known for her books on decision support systems. She is a professor in the Information Systems and Technology Department at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
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Marleen Temmerman
#114932
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Marleen Temmerman is a Belgian gynaecologist, professor and former Senator, currently heading the Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health at Aga Khan University in Nairobi, Kenya. Biography Temmerman has worked in various locations around the world for the health and rights of women and children. Most of her work is in the academic and political international arena, particularly in collaboration with United Nations organizations, such as WHO and UNFPA, as well as the European Union, the African Union, national governments in Europe and Africa, as well as with media and civil society.
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