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 Virology,
#1
David Baltimore
#213
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology David Baltimore is director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine and President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Milliken Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a PhD in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also conducted his postdoctoral research on virus replication. His research has produced remarkable contributions to cancer research, biotechnology, recombinant DNA research virology, and immunology. In 1975, he shared the Nobel Prize for P...
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Robert Gallo
#613
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Robert Charles Gallo is an American biomedical researcher. He is best known for his role in establishing the human immunodeficiency virus as the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome and in the development of the HIV blood test, and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research.
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Harald zur Hausen
#848
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Harald zur Hausen NAS EASA APS was a German virologist. He carried out research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008. He was chairman of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
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Luc Montagnier
#487
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Luc Montagnier was a French virologist and joint recipient, with and , of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus . He worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and as a full-time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
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Sandra Ciesek
#9633
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Sandra Ciesek is a German physician and virologist. She is the director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the Universitätsklinikum Frankfurt and professor of medical virology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Her main areas of research include new forms of therapy for hepatitis C and, more recently, the search for drugs against COVID-19.
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Renato Dulbecco
#888
Overall Influence
1914 - 2012 (98 years)
Renato Dulbecco was an Italian–American virologist who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oncoviruses, which are viruses that can cause cancer when they infect animal cells. He studied at the University of Turin under Giuseppe Levi, along with fellow students Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who also moved to the U.S. with him and won Nobel prizes. He was drafted into the Italian army in World War II, but later joined the resistance.
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Ab Osterhaus
#16635
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Albertus Dominicus Marcellinus Erasmus "Ab" Osterhaus is a leading Dutch virologist and influenza expert. An Emeritus Professor of Virology at Erasmus University Rotterdam since 1993, Osterhaus is known throughout the world for his work on SARS and H5N1, the pathogen that causes avian influenza.
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Thomas Huckle Weller
#4426
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Thomas Huckle Weller was an American virologist. He, John Franklin Enders and Frederick Chapman Robbins were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954 for showing how to cultivate poliomyelitis viruses in a test tube, using a combination of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue.
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Li-Meng Yan
#6262
Overall Influence
Li-Meng Yan or Yan Limeng is a Chinese virologist, known for her publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. Her publications have been widely dismissed as flawed by the scientific community.
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Shi Zhengli
#11862
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Shi Zhengli is a Chinese virologist who researches SARS-like coronaviruses of bat origin. Shi directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology . In 2017, Shi and her colleague Cui Jie discovered that the SARS coronavirus likely originated in a population of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan. She came to prominence in the popular press as "Batwoman" during the COVID-19 pandemic for her work with bat coronaviruses. Shi was included in Times 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
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Bernard Roizman
#21144
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Bernard Roizman is an American scientist born in Romania. He is the Joseph Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Virology in the Departments of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago.
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Roberto Burioni
#15512
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Roberto Burioni is an Italian virologist, physician, and academic. A Professor of Microbiology and Virology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, he runs there a lab developing human monoclonal antibodies against human infectious agents, the study of pathogen-host interplay, and the use of molecular tools in the early diagnosis of infectious diseases. A prominent virologist, Burioni has risen to fame in Italy for his strong stance against the antivaccination movement and has been described as the "most famous virologist in Italy".
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Marc Van Ranst
#9093
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Marc Van Ranst is a Belgian public health doctor and Professor of Virology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Rega Institute for Medical Research. On 1 May 2007, he was appointed as Interministerial comissionar by the Belgian federal government to prepare Belgium for an influenza pandemic.
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Bernard Moss
#31102
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Bernard Moss is a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the United States National Institutes of Health. He is the Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Viral Diseases and of the NIAID Genetic Engineering Section. He is known for his work on poxviruses.
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Yoshihiro Kawaoka
#17227
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Yoshihiro Kawaoka is a virologist specializing in the study of the influenza and Ebola viruses. He holds a professorship in virology in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and at the University of Tokyo, Japan.
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Charles M. Rice
#7043
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Charles Moen Rice is an American virologist and Nobel Prize laureate whose main area of research is the hepatitis C virus. He is a professor of virology at the Rockefeller University in New York City and an adjunct professor at Cornell University and Washington University School of Medicine. At the time of the award he was a faculty at Rockefeller.
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Howard Martin Temin
#5035
Overall Influence
1934 - 1994 (60 years)
Howard Martin Temin was an American geneticist and virologist. He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for which he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco and David Baltimore.
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Frank Fenner
#4865
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Frank John Fenner was an Australian scientist with a distinguished career in the field of virology. His two greatest achievements are cited as overseeing the eradication of smallpox, and the attempted control of Australia's rabbit plague through the introduction of Myxoma virus.
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Robert Webster
#33468
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Robert Gordon Webster is an avian influenza authority who correctly posited that pandemic strains of flu arise from genes in flu virus strains in nonhumans; for example, via a reassortment of genetic segments between viruses in humans and nonhumans rather than by mutations in annual human flu strains.
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Arturo Casadevall
#28238
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Arturo Casadevall is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease research, with a focus on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function. He was elected a member ...
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Salvador Luria
#393
Overall Influence
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
Salvador Edward Luria was an Italian microbiologist, later a naturalized U.S. citizen. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey, for their discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Salvador Luria also showed that bacterial resistance to viruses is genetically inherited.
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Malik Peiris
#18054
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Joseph Sriyal Malik Peiris is a Hong Kong-based British and Sri Lankann virologist, most notable for being the first person to isolate the SARS virus.He is the current Tam Wah-Ching Professor in Medical Science, and Chair Professor of Virology at the Division of Public Health Laboratory Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong. He was a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization of the World Health Organization from 2009 to 2010.
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Peter Palese
#16605
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Peter Palese is a United States microbiologist, researcher, inventor and the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and an expert in the field of RNA viruses.
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Hendrik Streeck
#17856
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Hendrik Streeck is a German researcher of human immunodeficiency virus, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. He is professor of virology and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at the University Bonn.
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George F. Gao
#53444
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Gao Fu , also known as George Fu Gao, is a Chinese virologist and immunologist. He served as Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention from August 2017 to July 2022 and has been Dean of the Savaid Medical School of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2015.
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Donald Jeffries
#22459
Overall Influence
1941 - 2011 (70 years)
Professor Donald Jeffries was a British virologist and academic. He was a leading expert on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS. Education Jeffries was educated at the William Ellis Grammar School in Highgate, North London, and then did medical training at the Royal Free Hospital School, from where he qualified in 1966.
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Marion Koopmans
#36356
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Maria Petronella Gerarda Koopmans is a Dutch virologist who is Head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience. Her research considers emerging infectious diseases, noroviruses and veterinary medicine. In 2018 she was awarded the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research Stevin Prize. She serves on the scientific advisory group of the World Health Organization.
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Robert M. Chanock
#26562
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Robert Merritt Chanock was an American pediatrician and virologist who made major contributions to the prevention and treatment of childhood respiratory infections in more than 50 years spent at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
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Christian Drosten
#22232
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Christian Heinrich Maria Drosten is a German virologist whose research focus is on novel viruses . During the COVID-19 pandemic, Drosten came to national prominence as an expert on the implications and actions required to combat the illness in Germany.
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Maurice Hilleman
#2430
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Maurice Ralph Hilleman was a leading American microbiologist who specialized in vaccinology and developed over 40 vaccines, an unparalleled record of productivity. According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly eight million lives each year. He has been described as one of the most influential vaccinologists ever.
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David Ho
#13954
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David Da-i Ho is a Taiwanese American AIDS researcher, physician, and virologist who has made a number of scientific contributions to the understanding and treatment of HIV infection. He championed for combination anti-retroviral therapy instead of single therapy, which turned HIV from absolute terminal disease into a chronic disease.
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Lawrence Corey
#62188
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Research and career In the early 1980s, Corey worked with Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and pharmacologist Dr. Gertrude Elion to demonstrate that an antiviral that was selective and specific for a viral-specified enzyme could be safely and effectively administered to control a chronic viral infection . Corey first conceived of, demonstrated the core concepts and directed line association between quantitative viral load reduction and clinical benefit using topical, intravenous and oral formulations of acyclovir in classic studies performed between 1980 and 1984. Acyclovir was the first antivir...
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Ralf Bartenschlager
#55589
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager is a German virologist who has been researching hepatitis C since 1989. He is a professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Heidelberg University. Early life Bartenschlager grew up in Mannheim. After high school, he worked as a policemen for four years before starting his undergraduate in biology in 1981 at Heidelberg University. He conduced his thesis work with Heinz Schaller at the ZMBH in Heidelberg on the structure and functional role of the P-protein in Hepatitis B viruses. After graduating in 1990, he continued working as a postdoc at Heidelberg U...
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John Skehel
#31879
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sir John James Skehel, is a British virologist and Emeritus scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. From 1987 to 2006 he was director of the National Institute of Medical Research at Mill Hill which was incorporated into the Crick Institute in 2016.
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Robert Purcell
#65901
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Robert Harry Purcell is an American virologist and former co-chief of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. He is known for his work on hepatitis viruses, and was involved in identifying hepatitis A virus, hepatitis D virus, and hepatitis E virus, developing an animal model for hepatitis B, and developing the hepatitis A vaccine.
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Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
#70797
Overall Influence
#37
Ralph S. Baric
#47157
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ralph Steven Baric is William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, and professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Peter Doherty
#17684
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter Charles Doherty is an Australian immunologist and Nobel laureate. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Rolf M. Zinkernagel in 1996 and was named Australian of the Year in 1997. In the Australia Day Honours of 1997, he was named a Companion of the Order of Australia for his work with Zinkernagel. He is also a National Trust Australian Living Treasure. In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations, Doherty's immune system research was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for its role as an ic...
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Robert Joseph Huebner
#71557
Overall Influence
#40
Adolfo García-Sastre
#67812
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Adolfo García-Sastre, is a Spanish professor of Medicine and Microbiology and co-director of the Global Health & Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. His research into the biology of influenza viruses has been at the forefront of medical advances in epidemiology.
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Robert Horne
#39008
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Robert W. Horne was a British virologist and expert in electron microscopy. Life and academic career Horne was raised in Montreal and served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He began his scientific career at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where he began working with transmission electron microscopes with Vernon Ellis Cosslett. He received his master's and doctorate from the University of Cambridge. In 1961, Horne moved to what was then the Institute of Animal Physiology , and in 1968 he moved again to what became the John Innes Centre, directed by Roy Markham.
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David Tyrrell
#45333
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
David Arthur John Tyrrell was a British virologist who was the director of the Common Cold Unit, which investigated viruses that caused common colds. He discovered the first human coronavirus in 1965. With June Almeida he made the first comparative study of human and chicken coronaviruses in 1967, and invented the name coronavirus in 1968.
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Hilary Koprowski
#2958
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Hilary Koprowski was a Polish virologist and immunologist active in the United States who demonstrated the world's first effective live polio vaccine. He authored or co-authored over 875 scientific papers and co-edited several scientific journals.
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Michael Houghton
#4781
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
#45
Demetrios Spandidos
#45311
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Demetrios A. Spandidos is a Greek virologist and cancer researcher. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Crete where he was professor of virology from 1989 till 2015. He is also the founder of Spandidos Publications and the editor-in-chief of all eight of its journals.
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Jonathan Ball
#76300
Overall Influence
Jonathan Kelvin Ball is professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham. His research relates to emerging viruses, viral vaccines and treatments, and blood-borne infections. He is also director of the Centre for Global Virus Research at the University of Nottingham.
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Jaap Goudsmit
#26332
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jaap Goudsmit is Dutch scientist, known for his research in the field of AIDS and influenza. He shifted his research interest to aging and neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's Disease. He is also a prolific writer of non-fiction books: Viral Sex, the Nature of AIDS ; Viral Fitness, the Next SARS and West Nile in the Making ; Serendipity Manual ; The Vaccine Bug, a personal history of the World of Immunity ; Immorbidity Alphabet, Spelling-out a life free of dis-ease ; The Time of your Life, Staying healthy to the End and The Art of Facing Mortality, a scientist's view .
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Barney S. Graham
#17311
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Barney S. Graham is an American immunologist, virologist, and clinical trials physician. He is currently Professor of Medicine and Microbiology, Biochemistry, & Immunology and Senior Advisor for Global Health Equity at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. He is the former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center , part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , National Institutes of Health . During his tenure at the VRC, Graham also served as chief of the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory.
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John Oxford
#35785
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John Sydney Oxford is an English virologist and a professor at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a leading expert on influenza, including bird flu and the 1918 Spanish Influenza, and HIV/AIDS.
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Anthony Epstein
#13969
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (105 years)
Sir Michael Anthony Epstein is a British pathologist and academic. He is one of the discoverers of the Epstein–Barr virus, along with Yvonne Barr and Bert Achong. Early and personal life Epstein was born on 18 May 1921, and educated at St Paul's School in London, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Middlesex Hospital Medical School.
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