Academic genealogy · North America
Who trained whom in turfgrass pathology, from the University of Wisconsin plant pathology department of the 1910s to the labs running today. Doctoral advising forms the rectilinear trunk; master's advising, postdoctoral training and succession in a post curve across it, because in a field this small a career usually carries more than one of those ties.
Click a node to see the record and light up every tie it has; the institution chips highlight everyone who trained or worked somewhere, so people who moved appear under more than one. Scroll or drag inside the frame to move around, and use the zoom buttons in its lower corner — or hold Ctrl or ⌘ and scroll — to work in closer; “Fit” scales the whole tree into the frame at once, and the percentage resets to full size. For two programs here — the CDGA and Ohio State — only the succession of posts is documented, so those lines carry no advising edges at all. The dotted violet line is informal mentorship: trained under someone without that person signing the degree. Bands group people by career stage rather than by strict generation, so plenty of edges run sideways within a band — Kerns advised Roberts, Kerns and Koch each hold posts the other once held — and those curve below the row rather than down to the next one.
Select anyone in the diagram for their degrees, posts, relationships, and the source behind each link.
The cases that broke the earlier outline version. Each of these people belongs to two or three lineages at once, which is normal here and invisible in a conventional tree.
Two kinds of people. Those in turf pathology whose training is undocumented, where one answer would place them in the diagram above; and figures from the neighbouring fields whose work shaped this one without being pathology at all.
Exactly one link here rests on surmise rather than evidence: the pair of Arkansas co-advisors on Nathan Walker's doctorate, carried at the unverified level and drawn with a dashed node outline to say so. Six more are dashed as reported — strongly evidenced, but without a source that states the relationship outright. The gaps that are left point upward rather than across: McCall's doctoral advisor at Virginia Tech, Vargas's at Minnesota, Mitkowski's at Cornell, Trevathan's own at Virginia Tech, Walker's master's advisor at Clemson, Wetzel's doctorate after Maryland, Latin's own training. Each would extend a line back a generation rather than add anyone new. Two of the longest-standing of these have just been closed by the people best placed to close them: Michael Fidanza supplied Martyn Jones as Noel Jackson's doctoral supervisor at Durham — the first link here to leave the United States — and Maria Tomaso-Peterson named Larry Trevathan as her own major professor. Both answers came from inside the diagram rather than from a source, which is what it was built for.
Two patterns show up once the graph is this complete. Turf pathology is entered more often than inherited: Uddin, Kennelly and Shaohui Wu all trained in other systems and specialized afterwards, so their doctoral edges run clean out of the field. And the destination is increasingly not a university — thirteen people here are in industry, five of them at Envu alone, the Maryland chair has lost two holders in a row to it, and of Clarke's students in this diagram more are now at companies than at universities.