Neurogeekery: The Genealogy
September 18, 2007
Just ran across the Neurotree site. They are trying to build training-relationship trees for neuroscience and depend on user input.
I’ve been sort of interested in training genealogy ever since I ran across an acquaintance’s tree which got back to Newton in rapid order.
Go contribute if you are a neuroscientist and have nothing better to do…
UPDATE: After browsing around a little bit on this thing it looks to have potential as a networking and mentor seeking tool. Although obviously it will not be comprehensive you can get an idea whether someone has launched a lot of independent careers or not.
DrugMonkey 
September 19, 2007 at 11:02 am
Interesting find. You can get a bite on a lot of “questions” about career too. We were discussing the job prospects of those from “big name” versus “just plain big” labs in another thread. At least for neuroscience, you can troll around some of the PIs who have trained an unending string and say “gee, how many have gone on to careers”. ‘course, as you say, there’s a huge selection bias here.
One thing I note is that there are a lot of essentially unconnected people in here so it could still use a lot of work…
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September 19, 2007 at 11:20 am
“One thing I note is that there are a lot of essentially unconnected people in here so it could still use a lot of work…”
That is an understatement. I would say that it is completely useless and uninteresting in its present state.
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September 19, 2007 at 11:56 am
Heh. Sounds like your genealogy is under represented my friend!
How about in a fully-realized state? Would you still find it uninteresting?
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September 19, 2007 at 12:21 pm
If it were reasonably complete, then I would find it interesting.
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September 19, 2007 at 12:39 pm
What are you people, freakin’ monarchists? One’s scientific value established by pedigree rather than papers?
Sheeesh.
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September 19, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Where do you get the cockamamie idea that the only reason someone would find a scientific pedigree interesting is because it provides some measure of “scientific value”? They are interesting for many reasons, and none of them have anything to do with attribution of “scientific value”.
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September 20, 2007 at 9:51 am
yeah, like how fast your history links back to Uncle Siggy ! Bet you didn’t know that, did you? LOL.
seriously though, pretty cool to track back to the psychodynamic, neuroanatomy and behaviorist traditions and see how they came together (in the same people frequently) to form the basis of neuroscience…
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November 30, 2007 at 2:00 pm
[…] 30, 2007 I had a note before on the Neurotree.org site which is databasing neuroscientists’ training genealogies. The […]
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