Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

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List of the most influential people in Virology,

#51

Duane J. Gubler

#80412

Overall Influence

#52

Peter M. Howley

#61827

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Peter Maxwell Howley is an American pathologist, virologist, and professor at Harvard Medical School. He has been president of the American Society for Virology and the American Society for Investigative Pathology and a co-editor of the Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease.

#53

Akiko Iwasaki

#72901

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Akiko Iwasaki is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. She is also a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research interests include innate immunity, autophagy, inflammasomes, sexually transmitted infections, herpes simplex virus, human papillomavirus, respiratory virus infections, influenza infection, T cell immunity, commensal bacteria, COVID-19 and Long COVID.

#54

Robert A. Lamb

#59073

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Robert A. Lamb was a British-American virologist. He was the Kenneth F. Burgess Professor at Northwestern University and since 1991, an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. From 1990 to 2016, he was the John Evans Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Northwestern University.

#55

Douglas Richman

#68464

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Douglas D. Richman is an American infectious diseases physician and medical virologist. Richman's work has focused on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, since its appearance in the early 1980s. His major contributions have been in the areas of treatment, drug resistance, and pathogenicity.

#56

Max Essex

#26943

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Myron Elmer "Max" Essex is the Mary Woodard Lasker Professor of Health Sciences, emeritus in the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard University, chair of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health AIDS Initiative in the department of immunology and infectious diseases, and chair of the Botswana–Harvard AIDS Institute in Gaborone, Botswana. Essex was one of the first to link animal and human retroviruses to immunosuppressive disease, to suspect that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS, and to determine that HIV could be transmitted through blood and blood products to hemophiliacs and recipients of blood transfusions.

#57

Laura Ayres

#26242

Overall Influence

1922 - 1992 (70 years)

Laura Ayres was a virologist who was one of Portugal's pioneers in the fight against AIDS. Early training Laura Guilhermina Martins Ayres was born on 1 June 1922 in Loulé in the Faro District of Portugal. She graduated in Medicine in 1946. It was during her subsequent internships in hospitals that she became interested in the study of communicable diseases. After her hospital training, she did an internship between 1950 and 1953 in Lisbon at the Instituto Superior de Higiene , the former designation of the Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr. Ricardo Jorge . There she carried out studies on the in...

#58

Robert R. Wagner

#55793

Overall Influence

1923 - 2001 (78 years)

Robert R. Wagner was an American virologist who spent time on the faculty at Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and finally the University of Virginia School of Medicine, from which he retired as professor emeritus in 1994. His research focused on the vesicular stomatitis virus. Wagner died of cancer in 2001.

#59

Geoffrey L. Smith

#54735

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Geoffrey Lilley Smith FRS FMedSci FRSB is a British virologist and medical research authority in the area of Vaccinia virus and the family of Poxviruses. Since 1 October 2011 he is head of the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge and a principal research fellow of the Wellcome Trust. Before that, he was head of the Department of Virology at Imperial College London.

#60

Eckard Wimmer

#19223

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Eckard Wimmer is a German American virologist, organic chemist and distinguished professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University. He is best known for his seminal work on the molecular biology of poliovirus and the first chemical synthesis of a viral genome capable of infection and subsequent production of live viruses.

#61

Yong Poovorawan

Yong Poovorawan

#22123

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Yong Poovorawan is a professor of pediatrics at the Faculty of Medicine of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He is known for research in the fields of pediatric hepatology, viral hepatitis and virology, and avian influenza.

#62

Robin A Weiss

#88937

Overall Influence

#63

Florian Krammer

#77871

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Florian Krammer is an Austrian-American virologist who has been Endowed Professor of Vaccinology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai since 2019. He was trained at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, where his mentor was Reingard Grabherr. He then completed his postdoc at Icahn under the supervision of Peter Palese. He has been the principal investigator of the Sinai-Emory Multi-Institutional Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Center since 2019.

#64

Elliott D. Kieff

#82638

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Elliott D. Kieff is an American physician who is the emeritus Harriett Ryan Albee Professor of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He had previously served as Chair of the Virology Program at Harvard Medical School from 1991 to 2004.

#65

Lutz Gissmann

#41986

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Lutz Gissmann is a German virologist and was head of the division Genome Modifications and Carcinogenesis at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg until his retirement in 2015. Lutz Gissmann is known for his seminal research in the field of human papillomaviruses and their causal association with human cancer, especially cervical cancer. In his early work, he demonstrated genetic heterogeneity among HPV isolates leading the way to the now well-established concept of distinct HPV types of which some are associated with specific benign or malignant disease. In the early 1980s in th...

#66

André R. Capron

#90462

Overall Influence

#67

David W. Golde

#90523

Overall Influence

#68

John R. Mascola

#71129

Overall Influence

John R. Mascola is an American physician-scientist, immunologist and infectious disease specialist. He was the director of the Vaccine Research Center , part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , National Institutes of Health . He also served as a principal advisor to Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, on vaccines and biomedical research affairs. Mascola is the current Chief Scientific Officer for ModeX Therapeutics.

#69

Leo Poon

#44905

Overall Influence

Leo Poon is the Head of the Division of Public Health Laboratory Science of the University of Hong Kong. In July 2020, Professor Malik Peiris stepped down from the position of co-director of the joint research pole between Hong Kong University and the Pasteur Institute , and Professor Leo Poon succeeded to this crucial WHO recognized Centre. He is one of the worlds' leading scientists investigating the emergence of viral diseases transferring from animals to humans, such as new strains of Influenza viruses and coronaviruses. Along with colleagues in his Division, he has made major contribu...

#70

Frederick G. Hayden

#92089

Overall Influence

#71

Peter Piot

#5100

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 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.

#72

Ron Fouchier

#59414

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Ronaldus Adrianus Maria Fouchier is a Dutch virologist who is Deputy head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience, headed by Prof. Marion Koopmans. Notability Fouchier is notable for his research on respiratory viruses of humans and animals, antigenic drift, and influenza virus zoonoses, transmission and pandemics. His team contributed substantially to the identification and characterization of various “new” viruses, such as human metapneumovirus, human coronavirus NL63, SARS coronavirus, MERS coronavirus, and influenza A virus subtype H16.

#73

Thomas Eugene Shenk

#92581

Overall Influence

#74

Michiaki Takahashi

#43772

Overall Influence

1928 - 2013 (85 years)

Michiaki Takahashi was a Japanese virologist, best known for inventing the first chickenpox vaccine. He developed the "Oka" vaccine by producing v-Oka, a live-attenuated virus strain of varicella zoster virus.

#75

Thomas C. Merigan

#81788

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Thomas Charles Merigan was born January 18, 1934 in San Francisco. He is an American virologist and the George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine, Emeritus at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Merigan's research first focused on human viral pathogenesis, basic and clinical studies of interferon, and then developing the first systemically active antiviral drugs including those effectively treatIng HIV/AIDS, several herpesviruses and hepatitis B. He is also credited with helping to develop the use of interferons as antiviral, immunomodulating and antitumor therapies. Merigan joined the Stanford faculty in 1963 and assumed full emeritus status in 2007.

#76

Shane Crotty

#78571

Overall Influence

Shane Patrick Crotty is a professor of immunology in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Education and academic posts Crotty completed B.S. degrees in Biology and Writing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. He then completed his Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of California, San Francisco with Raul Andino.

#77

Melanie Brinkmann

#45993

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Melanie Brinkmann is a German virologist. Until 2019 she was probably best known in connection with her work on the Cytomegalovirus. During 2020 she has emerged as a much consulted expert-pundit for media commentators keen to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. Brinkmann takes a robust public position in the campaign against pandemic misinformation: she has described the so-called "virus of false information" as "more deadly than the [COVID-19] virus itself".

#78

Flossie Wong-Staal

Flossie Wong-Staal

#29913

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Flossie Wong-Staal was a Chinese-American virologist and molecular biologist. She was the first scientist to clone HIV and determine the function of its genes, which was a major step in proving that HIV is the cause of AIDS. From 1990 to 2002, she held the Florence Riford Chair in AIDS Research at the University of California, San Diego . She was co-founder and, after retiring from UCSD, she became the chief scientific officer of Immusol, which was renamed Pharmaceuticals in 2007 when it transitioned to a drug development company focused on hepatitis C and continued as chief scientific offic...

#79

Fred Rapp

#93391

Overall Influence

#80

Jian Zhou

#28149

Overall Influence

1957 - 1999 (42 years)

Jian Zhou was a Chinese virologist and cancer researcher, who with fellow researcher Ian Frazer, invented Gardasil and Cervarix, the vaccines for stimulating human immunological resistance to the cervical cancer-inducing human papilloma virus.

#81

Johan Neyts

#88497

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Johan Hendrik Neyts is a Belgian virologist. He is head of The Neyts-lab of Virology, Antiviral Drug and Vaccine Research, which is part of the Laboratory of Virology and Chemotherapy at the Rega Institute for Medical Research, and full professor of virology at the Faculty of Medicine of KU Leuven. During the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, Neyts came to national prominence as an expert on the search for antiviral drugs and vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.

#82

John P. Moore

#30117

Overall Influence

John P. Moore is an American virologist and professor at Cornell University's Weill Cornell Medicine college, known for his research on HIV/AIDS. He previously worked at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. A former section editor of the Journal of General Virology, he is an outspoken critic of HIV/AIDS denialism, including the work of Peter Duesberg.

#83

Thomas Tedder

#59843

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Thomas Fletcher Tedder is an American immunologist. He is best known for his work in the fields of B lymphocyte biology and regulation. He is currently the Alter E. Geller Professor for Research in Immunology at Duke University.

#84

Bernard N. Fields

#24500

Overall Influence

1938 - 1995 (57 years)

Bernard Nathan Fields was an American microbiologist and virologist. Fields was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Fields was the Adele Lehman Professor and chairman of the department of microbiology and molecular genetics of Harvard Medical School, and he was the head of division of infectious diseases at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Prior to that, he was on the faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal Virology.

#85

Michael Stoker

#52694

Overall Influence

1918 - 2013 (95 years)

Sir Michael George Parke Stoker CBE FRS FRSE MD FRCP was a British physician and medical researcher in virology. Scientific career Stoker studied medicine at Clare College, Cambridge and St Thomas' Hospital in London, gaining his MD in 1947, after serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II. On return to civilian life he became a Fellow of Clare College from 1948 and an assistant tutor and director of medical studies from 1949 to 1958. Between 1953 and 1956, he researched the structure of Coxiella burnetii, the bacteria causing Q fever, with Paul Fiset.

#86

Andrea Gamarnik

Andrea Gamarnik

#68029

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Andrea Gamarnik is an Argentinian molecular virologist noted for her work on Dengue fever. She received a 2016 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science fellowship for work on mosquito-borne viruses include Dengue fever. She also was granted the Konex Award Merit Diploma in 2013 and the Platinum Konex Award in 2023 for her work in those last decades. She studied at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of California, San Francisco. She has done work for the Leloir Institute. She is the first female Argentinian to become a member of the American Academy of Microbiology.

#87

David M. Knipe

#77629

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

David Mahan Knipe is the Higgins Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in the Department of Microbiology at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts and co-chief editor of the reference book Fields Virology. He returned to the Chair of the Program in Virology at Harvard Medical School in 2019, having previously held the position from 2004 through 2016 and served as interim Co-Chair of the Microbiology and Immunobiology Department from 2016 through 2018.

#88

Francis V. Chisari

#93406

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Francis "Frank" Vincent Chisari is a physician, experimental pathologist, virologist, and immunologist, known for his research on virus-host interactions of hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Education and career Chisari graduated in 1963 with a bachelor's degree in biology from Fordham University and in 1968 with an M.D. from Cornell University's Weill Medical College. He was in 1970 and 1971 a fellow in anatomic pathology at the Mayo Clinic and in 1972 a staff associate in immunopathology at the NIH's Laboratory of Pathology. In 1973 he completed his residency in internal medicine at Dartmouth Medical School.

#89

Yuan Chang

#27609

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Yuan Chang is a Taiwanese-American virologist and pathologist who co-discovered together with her husband, Patrick S. Moore, the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus and Merkel cell polyomavirus, two of the seven known human oncoviruses.

#90

Karin Mölling

#27303

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Karin Mölling is a German virologist whose research focused on retroviruses, particularly human immunodeficiency virus . She was a full professor and director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the University of Zurich from 1993 to 2008. She is retired but retains affiliations with the University of Zurich and with the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin.

#91

Hidesaburo Hanafusa

#12227

Overall Influence

1929 - 2009 (80 years)

Hidesaburo Hanafusa was a Japanese virologist. He shared the 1982 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Harold E. Varmus and J. Michael Bishop for demonstrating how RNA tumor viruses cause cancer, and elucidating their role in combining, rescuing and maintaining oncogenes in the viral genome.

#92

Wendy Barclay

#20696

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Wendy Sue Fox is a British virologist. She is currently head of Department of Infectious Disease and chair in Influenza Virology at Imperial College London. She leads a team of scientists studying the influenza virus and its physiology and morphology to discover novel vaccines. In particular, they are trying to understand more about influenza virus mutations, and how they can allow scientists to create new vaccines against possible flu pandemics.

#93

Ruth Bishop

#28455

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Ruth Frances Bishop was an Australian virologist, who was a leading member of the team that discovered the human rotavirus. Biography Bishop was born in Dandenong, Victoria, and grew up in Frankston where her father was principal of Frankston High School.

#94

Luigi Naldini

#60712

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Luigi Naldini is an Italian gene therapist, professor of cell and tissue biology and of gene and cell therapy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, and the director of San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan, Italy. Often considered as "the father of the lentivirus gene therapy", he is globally known as the pioneer of "the development and applications of lentiviral vectors for gene transfer" that allowed the gene therapy treatment of several genetic diseases. He is also a scientific co-founder of three biotech start-up companies, Genenta in Milan and New York, Chroma Medicine in Milan and Boston, Genespire in Milan.

#95

Roger N. Beachy

Roger N. Beachy

#41080

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Roger N. Beachy is an American biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences who studies plant virology. He was the founding president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri, and the first director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

#96

Corrado Baglioni

#101994

Overall Influence

#97

Fabien Zoulim

#102319

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

#98

Hiroaki Mitsuya

#11916

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Hiroaki Mitsuya is a Japanese virologist famous for his role in discovery of the anti-HIV drug zidovudine as well as other anti-AIDS drugs including didanosine and zalcitabine . Mitsuya was born in Sasebo, Nagasaki and received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Kumamoto University. He joined the American National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1982, working initially on Human T-lymphotropic virus 1 before switching his attention to HIV. His identification of AZT as an anti-HIV drug, as well as the anti-HIV properties of didanosine and zalcitabine, was made in 1985. He was appointed Profes...

#99

Patrick S. Moore

Patrick S. Moore

#28461

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Patrick S. Moore is an Irish and American virologist and epidemiologist who co-discovered together with his wife, Yuan Chang, two different human viruses causing the AIDS-related cancer Kaposi's sarcoma and the skin cancer Merkel cell carcinoma. The couple met while in medical school together and were married in 1989 while they pursued fellowships at different universities.

#100

June Almeida

#46514

Overall Influence

1930 - 2007 (77 years)

June Dalziel Almeida was a Scottish virologist, a pioneer in virus imaging and identification. Her skills in electron microscopy earned her an international reputation. In 1964, Almeida was recruited by St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in London. By 1967, she had earned her Doctor of Science on the basis of her research and the resulting publications, while working in Canada, at Toronto's Ontario Cancer Institute and then in London at St Thomas's. she then continued her research at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School , which later became part of the Imperial College School of Medicine.

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