Welcome to GenealogySearch.info - Information on Genealogy software program

INTRODUCTION

In addition to his philosophical and research legacies (Bartholomew, 2005; Dawson, 2005), George Bartholomew also made an enduring contribution to organismal science in the many students that he trained. Bart supervised the training of 39 Ph.D. students, 5 postdoctoral researchers, and one Master's student during his long and distinguished tenure at the University of California at Los Angeles. These students went on to train their own students, producing a large descendant academic lineage. This lineage now spans a maximum of seven generations and includes nearly 1,200 individuals.

In 1987, Donald Hoyt summarized the academic relationships among Bart's doctoral students and their subsequent doctoral students in a pictorial descendant tree (Fig. 1). This tree included about 200 individuals at the time. On the occasion of this symposium honoring Bart and a decade of recipients of the Bartholomew Award of the Society, we decided to undertake the task of updating this academic lineage. It became obvious in short order than any sort of artistic rendition (such as Fig. 1) had become impossible because of the large number of individuals in the lineage.

Instead, we developed a web-based genealogy to document these academic relationships. The resulting database can store and display considerably more information than a traditional format, including more detailed relationships, current position, and contact information. The electronic format is also much easier to correct and update. Charles Lowe, Webmaster in Biological Sciences Computing Support, developed new academic genealogical software for this purpose, and the resulting academic genealogical tree for George A. Bartholomew can be accessed at http://bartgen.bio.uci.edu/tree. For each individual, their name, their advisor's name, their degree and year of degree, their current title and institution, their address, e-mail address and their telephone number is recorded, when this information is known. Because of the number of individuals involved, it is not feasible to list here even the names of all the descendants, much less other information about them. A small portion of the database is shown in Figure 2, which enumerates the first Ph.D. student graduated from each descendant's laboratory and their academic position.

The current database contains more than 1,170 individuals, most of whom are still active scientists. As Bart himself has remarked, it is both incredible and extremely gratifying for a living scientist to have over a thousand descendants and to view the scope of his influence of his own and allied fields. Most individuals in this tree continue to work in the area of comparative/ecological/evolutionary physiology, but parts of the lineage have diversified to other areas, including behavior, endocrinology, population and community ecology, conservation, and evolution. His students have brought his insights and outlook into these fields, enriching them and broadening their outlook.

In structuring this database, we had to create some structural rules regarding the display of the relationships. We included not only Ph.D. students, but also postdoctoral researchers, Master's students and current students, because all of these are significant academic relationships. Including these categories, however, created the problem of multiple relationships within the lineage. A Master's student may have gone on to do a Ph.D. degree and/or spent a period of postdoctoral study with other Bartholomew descendants. In fact, this happened frequently. Entering the same individual into the database at multiple points was not desirable. We therefore prioritized the order of entry as follows, according to the first Bartholomew-related supervisor: 1) Doctoral student, 2) Postdoctoral researcher, 3) Master's student, and 4) Current student. We recognize that this tree is not complete, and we encourage corrections and updates.

We hope that this database will serve several purposes. The most important of these is to document Bart's lineage and his influence on the field. It also can serve as a convenient database of contact information. We also believe that historians of science will find such the documentation of academic relationships important in following the development and flow of ideas within and among areas of science. To this end, this academic genealogy program will be made available to academic institutions for non-commercial use. Individuals interested in acquiring the code should visit http://bartgen.bio.uci.edu/request/ to request the software. (Appropriate credit must be given to the UC Regents and the UCI School of Biological Sciences, which assume no liability resulting from the program's use. The program is provided as is and contains no pre-or-post installation support of the application code or its supporting application server and database.)

1 From the Symposium Integrative Biology: A Symposium Honoring George A. Bartholomew presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 5-9 January 2004 at New Orleans. Louisiana.

REFERENCES

Bartholomew, G. A. 2005. Integrative biology, an organismic biologist's point of view. Integ. Comp. Biol. 45:xx-xx.

Dawson, W. R. 2005. George A. Bartholomew's contributions to integrative and comparative biology. Integ. Comp. Biol. 45:xx-xx.

ALBERT F. BENNETT2,* AND CHARLES LOWE[dagger]

* Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697 [dagger] Biological Sciences-Computing Support, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697

2 E-mail: abennett@uci.edu