Life and health scientists

Louis J. Ptáček

Louis J. Ptáček, also written Louis Ptacek, is an American neurologist and human geneticist at UCSF who pioneered the study of channelopathies and established human sleep genetics.

Louis Jacobsohn-Lask, born Louis Jacobsohn, was a German neurologist and neuroanatomist known for the Bekhterev–Jacobsohn finger-flexion reflex and handbooks on nervous-system anatomy; expelled in 1933, he died in Sevastopol in 1940.

Louis K. Diamond

Louis K. Diamond was an American pediatric hematologist at Harvard Medical School, considered a founder of pediatric hematology, who devised the exchange transfusion for Rh disease.

Louis Lapicque

Louis Lapicque (1866–1952) was a French physiologist who made nerve and muscle excitability quantitative, defining the chronaxie and proposing in 1907 the strength–duration equation underlying the integrate-and-fire neuron model.

Sep 17, 2026

Louis Leakey

Louis Leakey (Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, 1903–1972) was a Kenyan-born British paleoanthropologist whose East African excavations, above all at Olduvai Gorge, established Africa as the cradle of human evolution.

Louis M. Kunkel

Louis M. Kunkel is an American human geneticist at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital best known for identifying the gene altered in Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Louis M. Luttrell

Louis M. Luttrell is an American physician-scientist and endocrinologist at the Medical University of South Carolina whose work showed β-arrestins organize their own GPCR signaling pathways.

Louis M. Sherwood

Louis M. Sherwood was an American endocrinologist whose laboratory work showed that blood calcium directly controls parathyroid hormone secretion, and who later held senior roles at Merck.

Louis M. Staudt

Louis M. Staudt is an American cancer researcher who defined the molecular subtypes of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and leads the NCI Lymphoid Malignancies Branch.

Louis Otto Kunkel

Louis Otto Kunkel (1884–1960) was an American botanist and plant pathologist who led the Rockefeller Institute's plant pathology division from 1932 and was known for his work on leafhopper-carried yellows diseases.

Louis R. Caplan

Louis R. Caplan, born 1936 in Baltimore, Maryland, is an American neurologist specializing in stroke, a Harvard Medical School professor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who founded the Harvard Stroke Registry.

Louis R. Wasserman

Louis R. Wasserman (1910–1999) was an American hematologist who spent nearly 60 years at Mount Sinai in New York, founding its hematology department and the Polycythemia Vera Study Group.

Louis S. Goodman

Louis S. Goodman (1906–2000) was an American pharmacologist who led the first effective anticancer chemotherapy with nitrogen mustard in 1942 and co-authored The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, still the field's standard reference.

Sep 17, 2026

Louis Scheffer

Louis Scheffer is an electrical engineer turned neurobiologist and Principal Scientist at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus, best known as lead author of the 2020 fruit fly brain connectome.

Louis Siminovitch

Louis Siminovitch (1920–2021) was a Canadian molecular biologist and geneticist, called the father of genetic research in Canada, who helped discover bacteriophage lysogeny and stem cell self-renewal.

Louis Sokoloff

Louis Sokoloff (1921–2015) was an American neuroscientist who led NIMH's Laboratory of Cerebral Metabolism and developed the 2-deoxyglucose method for mapping brain activity, the basis of PET imaging, winning the 1981 Lasker Award.

Louis V. Avioli

Louis V. Avioli was an American endocrinologist at Washington University who pioneered vitamin D research and founded the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.

Louis Vermeulen

Louis Vermeulen (born 1984) is a Dutch molecular oncologist who studies cancer stem cell dynamics in the intestinal lining and colorectal cancer subtypes, and leads Discovery Oncology at Genentech.

Louis Weinstein

Louis Weinstein (1909-2000) was an American physician regarded as a founder of infectious diseases as a medical specialty, leading the field at Tufts from 1957 to 1975.

Louis Willems

Louis Willems (1822–1907) was a Belgian physician in Hasselt who showed in 1851 that inoculating cattle with diseased lung matter protects against bovine pleuropneumonia, a forerunner of Louis Pasteur.

Sep 17, 2026

Louis Wilson (plant biochemist)

Louis Wilson (Louis F.L. Wilson) is a British plant biochemist and HHMI postdoctoral scientist at the University of Virginia who studied plant cell wall polysaccharides.

Louis Wolff

Louis Wolff (1898–1972) was an American cardiologist in Boston who co-described Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome in 1930, led Beth Israel Hospital's electrocardiography laboratory from 1928 to 1964, and advanced spatial vectorcardiography.

Louis Zetzel

Louis Zetzel was an American gastroenterologist who led the Gastrointestinal Department at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and served as an associate clinical professor at Harvard Medical School.

Louis-Antoine Ranvier

Louis-Antoine Ranvier (1835–1922) was a French physician and histologist who held the chair of general anatomy at the Collège de France from 1875 and gave his name to the node of Ranvier.

Louisa Degenhardt

Louisa Degenhardt is an Australian psychologist and epidemiologist who studies the prevalence and health harms of illicit drug use, and is Research Director of NDARC at UNSW Sydney.

Louise Johnson

Dame Louise Napier Johnson (1940–2012) was a British biophysicist who pioneered X-ray protein crystallography of enzymes, studying lysozyme, glycogen phosphorylase, and cell-cycle protein kinases at Oxford.

Louise Leakey

Louise Leakey is a Kenyan-based paleoanthropologist, granddaughter of Louis and Mary Leakey, who leads the Koobi Fora Research Project in the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya.

Louise M. Howard

Louise M. Howard, also known as Louise Howard, is a British perinatal psychiatrist and Professor Emerita of Women's Mental Health at King's College London, appointed OBE in 2023.

Louise O. Fresco

Louise O. Fresco (born 1952) is a Dutch agronomist and food-system scholar who led the FAO's agriculture department and was president of Wageningen University & Research from 2014 to 2022.