The Astronomy Genealogy Project and You

The information posted in AstroGen at https://astrogen.aas.org/ may be of use to you. If you are a prospective astronomy graduate student (or advisor to one), you can find which universities are producing Ph.D.s in your field of interest, and you can peruse some of the theses recently completed. The acknowledgments sections of the theses often give an excellent perspective on what it is like to be a graduate student in a particular department. If you are interested in the history or sociology of science, you can gather data on the production of doctorates by year, country, university, advisor, or thesis title words, and you can follow links to more than 19,000 online theses. If you earned a doctorate with an astronomy-related thesis, or supervised one, you should be included. If you are, you can check your entry and provide updates or corrections. If not, you can add yourself to the list. You can add entries for people you know or, if they are already in the database, check on their contents. If you have some available time and interest, you can volunteer to help expand the database. AstroGen is now “nearly complete” for 26 countries, with some 34,000 scientists entered, but there is still much more to be done.