Academic Family Trees

My former colleague Chris Richards alerted me to this “Chemical Genealogy” page from Professor Ged Parkin’s webpage. It’s a neat idea – tracing the influence of academics on their students over time, allowing you to say “you know, my great, great, grand-supervisor was Lavoisier.” The page is from a large collection of such information created by Vera Mainz at Illinois. The emphasis throughout is obviously supervisor-PhD relationships, but there is an ‘influence’ category that I guess concerns postdocs etc, which I think is right. My postdoc advisor (Paul Bartlett) certainly influenced my academic development (for the better!). It would be great to have an interactive wiki version that people could insert themselves into such that the filigree of entries grows and can be navigated.