Academic Family Tree

Researchers and clinicians spend several years training with just a handful of experienced mentors. These relationships form a critical foundation for their subsequent career. The Academic Family Tree is an open access, web-based project that seeks to document mentoring relationships across academic fields. In addition to providing an unique educational resource for exploring the history of multiple disciplines, this project supports research into the role of mentorship in shaping academic fields. Thus far, the tree has documented information about over 800,000 researchers and continues to grow daily, thanks to contributions of over 7,000 volunteer users and editors. Financial support helps us keep the web server and database running. Ongoing projects are to expand the interface, develop network and semantic tools to characterize how mentors influence their trainees and their fields more broadly. In particular, we are exploring ways to exploring how demographics (gender, socioeconomic status) of both mentor and trainee influence the outcomes of these relationships.