Rich Gleanings from AstroGen

After eight years of development and data gathering, the Astronomy Genealogy Project (AstroGen: https://astrogen.aas.org) went online 25 July 2020, the 159th anniversary of the first astronomical doctorate awarded in the USA. AstroGen, a project of the AAS Historical Astronomy Division (HAD), is a database of astronomy-related doctoral dissertations hosted online by the AAS. AstroGen clearly struck a chord in the community, as many reactions, additions, and corrections came flowing in immediately afterward. When it went online, it contained 33,000 dissertations and more are being added every day. Clearly, AstroGen can never be finished: the team will continue working to update the database with new theses, while also augmenting, and correcting, the historical record and expanding the database to include more countries. AstroGen serves also as a historical database of astronomers and allows the reader to follow links from an astronomer to his or her academic parent (thesis advisor) and children (doctoral students). Eventually it will allow the extraction of the number of astronomy-related doctorates granted over any time period and by any university or country, thus enabling a wide range of studies in the history and sociology of modern astronomy. We encourage you to check your own entry, correct it if necessary, or add it if it is missing. You can add entries for people you know or, if they are already in the database, check on their contents. And we continue to seek more participants for the team, including people who can gather data from countries not yet explored, especially in Asia. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the AAS and the HAD.