Astronomy Genealogy Project Update

The AAS and its Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) launched the Astronomy Genealogy Project, or AstroGen, last July (read the press release, in case you missed it). The project’s website at https://astrogen.aas.org provides information on more than 34,000 astronomers who earned doctorates with astronomy-related theses and/or supervised research for such dissertations.

It is called a genealogy project because, in academic genealogy, a person’s “parent” is their thesis advisor. The AstroGen website contains links to the dissertations themselves, when available, as well as to the astronomers, their advisors, and their universities. Although the database goes back to 1766, fully half of the doctorates in the database have been awarded since 2002. About two-thirds of the theses are online.

At the AstroGen site you can find, for example, that academically, Carl Sagan was the son of Gerard P. Kuiper, whose name is synonymous with the belt of icy objects beyond Neptune, and the grandson of Ejnar Hertzsprung, who began his career in chemical engineering but whose name is now in every introductory astronomy textbook thanks to the color-magnitude diagram that he and Henry Norris Russell created independently a little more than a century ago. Digging deeper than what's shown in the chart at right, you can identify Sagan's "sons" among the succeeding generation of planetary scientists as well as the "grandsons" and "granddaughters" who earned their doctorates under Sagan's former students.

All the data on AstroGen have been collected by volunteers. Please help HAD expand and improve AstroGen by sending Additions and/or Corrections (for example, to ensure that your own listing is complete and correct) and/or by volunteering to take on specific tasks such as updating listings from a university or country or translating thesis titles from a particular language. Thank you!