There was a plethora of scientific talent across the disciplines and globe in the third annual edition of Nature’s 10 people who mattered this year.

The list includes:

Biologist Feng Zhang who helped to develop a powerful genome-editing technique.

Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor behind one of the biggest exoplanet discoveries in years.

British physicist Henry Snaith who developed promising new solar cells that can combine high efficiency with low costs.

Science Policy Expert Tania Simoncelli for her role in a lawsuit that overturned an important gene patent in the United States.

Virologist Deborah Persaud who helped to establish how a baby was cured of HIV.

Filipino diplomat Naderev Saño who focused attention on global warming in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.

Anthropologist Kathryn Clancy who unearthed disturbing trends in sexual assaults at field sites.

Biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov who developed embryonic stem cells from cloned human embryos.

Researcher Viktor Grokhovsky  who lead the way in collecting pieces of the asteroid that hit Russia in February

Hualan Chen who helped China quell its H7N9 avian flu outbreak.
Accompanying the annual list is the five people to watch in 2014. These include:

Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, the incoming President of the European Research Council.

Masayo Takahashi, the Japanese scientist who plans to use stem cells derived from patients to treat macular degeneration.

Chris Field who will co-chair the upcoming IPCC report on the impacts of climate change.

Koppillil Radhakrishnan chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation leading the country’s first attempt to visit Mars

Gordon Sanghera, the chief executive of Oxford Nanopore who will reveal the first data collected using the UK company’s MinION genetic sequencer.