Your Academic Lineage
by Jeremy on Jul 05 2010 (13586 Views)Over dinner the other night, my uncle and I started comparing and contrasting our academic experiences. He’s a fascinating person who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science in the late 1970’s.
After discussing the finer points of Moore’s Law, and how he agonized over purchasing a 20 MB hard drive in the 1980’s for $400, the substance of the conversation switched. “Have you ever researched your Ph.D. lineage,” he asked.
“I’ve gone as far back as Breslow,” I replied, completely forgetting that he probably didn’t know this “Breslow” character.
It turns out that several of his doctoral computer buddies had recently taken on this task, many of them somehow descending (academically) from Charles Babbage.
Our discussion prompted me to further examine my background. I soon discovered that there are several University websites that provide chemistry academic lineage for their faculty members. Being an organic chemist, I was interested to learn that E.J. Corey worked for John Sheehan (I admit it...I'm nerdly). In any case, here are some websites I found interesting:
- UT Austin is a really good site to start exploring. Here, I was able to learn that my roots (through Eric Anslyn) purportedly go through Breslow and Ira Remsen (1870), all the way back to Torbern Bergman (1758).
- My personal favorite website is the lineage posted by North Dakota State University. Apart from deriving academic lineage all the way back to Nicolo da Lonigo (1453), they’ve complied all of the data/information into a colorful map that would no doubt look good on a faculty member’s wall.
- Some other sites: UMass Amherst, Illinois, UConn, Kentucky, and Michigan State.
Sometimes I think my boss (who made and maintains the Illinois genealogy site) is more interested in his pet projects than my research. I tend to agree.
thanks for these links! pretty cool.
Just checked mine out. My academic great grandfather is Robert Ireland (of Ireland Claisen fame). His academic grandfather is Louis Fieser, who has his own tree on the Illinois website. I can claim lineage all the way back to da Lonigo!
[...] Jeremy over at Chemistryblog posted a few sites with info on academic lineage of many chemists. That inspired me to finish researching my academic genealogy. Kallie’s page at UT’s site was a nice confirmation of the lineage I had independently found. But I actually found links further back (through Rowland to Helmholtz, and eventually back to Leibniz’s dad); I’m not exactly sure why the UT page stops at Mendenhall. [...]
Seth has put an incredible amount of work into our department's genealogy. I think it is one of the most accurate ones out there. Thanks for linking it.
Thanks for the comments about the NDSU academic genealogy. I will hopefully have a further updated version up soon. The most extensive one on the web (and fully searchable) is still the site posted at the Univ of Illinois. Vera and Greg have put a lot of work into that one and it is a great resource for the chemical community.
Nice post!
Thanks
good post, i will come back
This is always a fun topic. In my undergrad lab there was a postdoc who had traced our academic lineage back to the 15th century through out PI!