The 5 people on the Time 100 list you’ve never heard of

Yahoo! News got a web-exclusive look at Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, with a cover that features Lady Gaga, Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Conan O’Brien, among others (see the image below).

But the list is full of non-marquee names, too. Here’s our rundown of the five entries on the list you’ve probably never heard of.

Jenny Beth Martin

Move over Sarah Palin. Martin is a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots group, which claims 15 million members. Martin has also worked as a paid Republican consultant. She told USA Today she became a protester after her husband’s business went under and the two were cleaning houses. She helped organize the movement’s march on Washington in September. “It’s not your hippie protesters,” she says of Tea Partiers. “It’s people who are working hard for their families and they don’t want their money taken away from them to be given to people who aren’t working hard.”

Dr. Douglas Schwartzentruber and Dr. Larry Kwak

Time wrote about Schwartzentruber and Kwak’s work to develop a vaccine that could prevent cancer and eliminate the need for radiation and chemotherapy. The two shocked the medical world when they announced in June 2009 that their separate studies where they innoculated patients with melanoma or lymphoma had garnered positive results.

Reem Al Numery

Al Numery was forced to marry her 30-year-old cousin when she was only 12, and her own father threatened to murder her when she fought back and ran away. Yemeni officials refused her petition for a divorce, and she was unable to attend a ceremony in her honor in the U.S. because she was forbidden to leave her home country. “While my hair was styled for the ceremony, I thought of ways to set fire to my wedding dress,” she said. “When I protested, my dad gagged me and tied me up. After the wedding, I tried to kill myself twice.” She was finally granted a divorce from the Yemeni legal system and is an advocate for ending child marriage. In her tribute in Time, feminist leader Gloria Steinem describes Reem “one of the brave girl children who are risking everything to protest being sold into marriage by fathers and becoming the endangered and uneducated chattel of husbands.”

Mark Carney

As Canada’s central banker, Mark Carney had the good fortune of presiding over a country that didn’t need a single bailout while the U.S. financial sector was in grave peril 2008 and 2009. At 45, Carney is one of the youngest Canadian central bankers ever, and is the only one with a background in investment banking. He spent more than 10 years at Goldman Sachs, and doesn’t get distracted by “populist zeal” while working toward banking reforms with the G-8, Time’s tribute says.

Neill Blomkamp

The 30-year-old South African filmmaker blew critics away with his sci-fi flick District 9, which he wrote and directed. The low-budget movie—Blomkamp’s first—was filmed in a quasidocumentary style and won wide praise for its groundbreaking visual effects. District 9, The fim also employed familiar themes in sci-fi storytelling to develop a sharp allegory about the lingering fallout from apartheid-era South Africa. It earned a Best Picture nomination at the 2009 Oscars, and Blomkamp has said he might do a sequel.

You can see the full list here. And check out the issue’s four-paneled cover:

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