Academic Lineage

As a Ph.D. student I am just one in a long chain of researchers before me. Being a fan of history, I thought that it would be interesting to try and track back all my {great}* grand advisors through time. It was doubly interesting to me because my field (computer science) is a very young one. I wanted to know which of the many fields spawned my line of computer scientists. Here are the results (most recent graduates first).


Brad Calder
Graduated 1995 University of Colorado at Boulder

Brad Calder (my advisor) is currently a tenured professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in computer architecture and compiler optimization, including but not limited to: customized processors, simulation methodology, prefetching, critical path analysis, dynamic compilation, predicated execution, value-based optimization, and the performance of mobile code. Read more


Dirk Grunwald
Graduated 1989 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Dirk Grunwald is currently a tenured professor at the University of Colorado at Bolder doing research on the interaction of compilers, runtime systems and architectures for sequential and parallel architecture. His research program covers the design and implementation of runtime systems for parallel programs, including "data parallel" and threaded applications as well as varied aspects of computer architecture, including instruction processing and memory prefetching. Read more


Daniel A. Reed
Graduated 1983 Purdue

Daniel A. Reed is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition, he holds a joint appointment as a Senior Research Scientist with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He is the author of research papers and monographs on algorithms, architectures, and performance evaluation techniques for high-performance computing and virtual environments. His Pablo research group has developed tools and techniques for characterizing parallel systems and applications, as well as supporting parallel I/O systems. His recent work in the Scalable I/O Initiative has led to the forthcoming book Scalable Input/Output: Achieving System Balance, to be published by MIT Press. Read more


Herb D. Schwetman
Graduated 1970 UT Austin

Herb Schwetman is founder and president of Mesquite Software, Inc. Prior to founding Mesquite Software in 1994, he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at MCC from 1984 until 1994. He has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin since 1984. From 1972 until 1984, he was a Professor of Computer Sciences at Purdue University. Dr. Schwetman received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin in 1970. He has been involved in research into system modeling and simulation as applied to computer systems since 1968. Read more


J. C. Browne, UT Austin
Graduated 1960 UT Austin

Dr. Browne joined the physics and computer sciences faculty in 1968. His teaching and research interests include parallel architectures and parallel programming, performance measurement and analysis, operating systems, software engineering and VLSI synthesis. His early research career in computational physics adds familiarity with large scale computational problems. He is currently focused on integration of Computer Science with application discipline expertise. Read more


Fredrick A. Matsen (1913)
Graduated 1940 Princeton

Born 1913, Matsen's first research was on the theory of liquids, and his first quantum chemistry research was "The Molecular Orbital Theory of the Spectra of Monosubstituted Benzenes". He was an early adopter of computing in the sciences, first doing quantum chemistry calculations on an card programmed IBM 650. His latter work includes algebraic quantum chemistry and spin-free quantum chemistry. Read More


Henry Eyring (1901-1981)
Graduated 1927 Berkeley

Henry Eyring was born in Colonia Juarez, Mexico in 1901. He is most well known for his work in Physical Chemistry and chemical kinetics, but has scientific interests far beyond that. He applied the idea of calculation of the potential energy surfaces to problems in surface catalysis. The constant thinking in terms of these surfaces led in due course to what is probably Eyring's most important scientific contribution: the development of the notion of the activated complex as an entity controlling the rates of chemical reactions with a definite mean lifetime and capable of treatment in rigorous thermodynamic and statistical mechanical terms. As is well known the paper presenting this idea was first rejected when submitted to the Journal of Chemical Physics, but the editor was persuaded to change his mind and the paper appeared in 1935. After a long stay at Princeton, he latter moved to Utah to start their first graduate program, and served as Dean for many years. Read more


George Gibson (1884-1959)
Graduated 1911 University of Breslau

Dr. Gibson, born in Edinburgh Scotland 1884, performed much of his early research at Berkeley in spectroscopy and low temperature calorimetry. Throughout his distinguished career, he had an interest in the relationship between radiation and chemistry. Publications in 1927 show his early interest in the ionizing effects of alpha particles upon various gases and had an early appreciation of the relationship between quantum statistics, spectra, and chemistry. Well known students include Latimer, Parks, Giaque, Phipps, Eyring, Rice, and Seaborg, two of which have received Nobel Prizes. Read more


Otto R. Lummer (1860-1925)
Graduated ~1887 University of Berlin

The German born Lummer became professor at the University of Breslau in 1905. In 1889 he designed, with Eugene Brodhum, a photometer with an arrangement of prisms, which was an improved version of the grease-spot photometer invented by Robert Bunsen. Lummer's research was chiefly on radiation energy and temperature. Working with Wilhelm Wien he achieved in practice the black-body radiator, which had been conceived as a theoretical abstraction in the study of radiant heat. In 1899 he did further work with Ernst Pringsheim on the distribution of energy in black-body radiation - work that eventually led to Max Planck's formulation of the quantum theory. Lummer also built, with Leon Arons, a mercury vapor lamp in 1892.


Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
Graduated 1843 Royal Friedrich-Wilhelm Institute of Medicine and Surgery in Berlin

Born in Potsdam, Germany, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was not trained to be a professor through traditional means but was rather trained as a medical doctor, on a grant from the Prussian Army. Although later in life he accepted a position as the chair of a new physics institute in Berlin. Helmholtz work included important results in such diverse fields as optics, thermodynamics (as the inventor of the conservation of energy), topology, vision, and acoustics. Read more