The academic lineage of
Railsback's graduate students
is as follows:
(Note that the list includes a president of the Geochemical Society in Generation 3, a president of the American Geophysical Union in Generation 5, presidents of the Paleontological Society in Generations 6, 7, and 8, a signer of the American Declaration of Independence, and a convicted forger.)
| 1. | |
| Bruce Railsback (1957- ; Ph.D., Illinois, 1989). His M.S. work on diagenesis in Pennsylvanian limestones at the University of Iowa was supervised by Phil Heckel (see below). His dissertation used oxygen isotope compositions of brachiopods to reconstruct Ordovician deep ocean circulation. His Ph.D. advisor was Tom Anderson (see below). | ![]() |
| 2. | |
| Philip Henry Heckel (Ph.D., Rice, 1966). Geologist and Research Associate at the Kansas Geological Survey 1965-1971; Professor at the University of Iowa 1971 to present; Chairman of the Iowa Department of Geology 1995-1998. His dissertation was on the "Stratigraphy, petrography, and depositional environment of the Tully Limestone (Devonian) in New York State and adjacent region". His work at the Kansas Survey and at Iowa has focused on Pennsylvanian cyclic sediments, largely in the Midcontent region of North America. He has served on the Subcommission on Carboniferous Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences. | ![]() |
| Thomas Frank Anderson (1939- ; Ph.D., Columbia, 1967). His dissertation research concerned isotopic re-equilibration of calcite, and most of his research was in stable isotope geochemistry of sediments and sedimentary rocks. He was a faculty member in Geology at the University of Illinois from 1969 to 2000 and also served as an associate dean there. His Ph.D. advisor was Wally Broecker (see below). | ![]() |
| 3. | |
| Wallace Smith Broecker (Ph.D., Columbia, 1959). His dissertation research was on "Application of radiocarbon to oceanography and climatic chronology". His research has spanned a variety of topics concerned with the carbon cycle and the ocean-atmosphere system, and he is perhaps most noted for explaining deep ocean circulation and its geochemical effects. He won the Geological Society of America's Arthur L Day Medal in 1984, the Alexander Agassiz Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1986, the Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1990, the National Medal of Science in 1996, and the Tyler Prize for environmental research in 2002. He was president of the Geochemical Society in 1981. He is Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory. His Ph.D. advisor was Larry Kulp (see below). | ![]() ![]() |
| 4. | |
| John Laurence Kulp
(1921- ; Ph.D., Princeton, 1945). His research interests included radiocarbon dating and other isotope geochronology, and in 1960 he published a widely cited geologic time scale (Rep. Intl. Geol. Cong. 21st Session, Part III, p. 18-27). With Maurice Ewing, he was one of the leaders in the development of the Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University. In the mid-1960s he left academia to work for Isotopes, Inc., Teledyne, and Weyerhauser. In the 1980s he was the Reagan Administration's director of the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, and he was noted for a controversial report arguing that relatively little forest had been damaged by acid rain. He later was an expert for the American Council on Science and Health, a corporate-funded group dealing with environmental issues. As recently as 1997, he was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington and
lecturing
on the long-term availablity of natural resources. Larry Kulp's advisees at Columbia included Wally Broecker, Dick Holland, and Karl Turekian. In their introduction to the 2003 Treatise on Geochemistry, Holland and Turekian wrote of Kulp, "He introduced us to the excitement of doing science and convinced us that all of the sciences are really subdisions of geochemistry". Larry Kulp's Ph.D. advisor was Richard M. Field (see below). |
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| 5. | |
| Richard Montgomery Field (1885-1961; Sc.D. Harvard University, 1918) His dissertation research was on "The stratigraphy of the Middle Ordovician formations of central and north-central Pennsylvania". Among Field's early publications were "A natural classification of sedimentary rocks", "The great Bahama Bank; studies in marine carbonate sediments", "Paleoceanography of limestone seas", "Geology of the Bahamas", "Ordovician sections of Great Britain and their American equivalents", "Microbiology and the marine limestones", and "Ecology of calcareous sediments in the West Indies". His last publication was on "Geophysical - geochemical - geological significance of geosynclines" and thus went back to a major concept introduced by James Hall, of whom more is written below.
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| 6. | |
| Percy Edward Raymond
(1879-1952; Ph.D. Yale University, 1905). He began his geological education with an A.B. at Cornell, where his mentor was Gilbert Harris (see below). He went to Yale to study with Charles Emerson Beecher, but Beecher died in 1904. Raymond then left Yale to be Assistant Curator at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. However, he was soon invited back to Yale to help Charles Schuchert prepare for his teaching there, because the latter had never attended, let alone taught, a college class. Raymond and Schuchert became good friends, and Raymond finished his Ph.D. degree in 1905 with Schuchert (see below) as his advisor. The two remained friends until Schuchert's death, but Raymond's work was mostly with trilobites, which reflected Beecher's brief influence.
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| 7. | |
| Gilbert Dennison Harris (1864-1952: degree from Cornell University, 1887). Harris worked for the Arkansas Geological Survey from 1888 to 1890, the U.S. Geological Survey in 1892, and then for the Geological Survey of Texas. Harris's main interests lay in Eocene molluscs, and he went to Europe to study the London and Paris Basins. He was Professor of Paleontology at Cornell from 1894 to 1934. Much of his work in those years was in the Tertiary of the Gulf Coast, and he was in charge of a geological survey of Louisiana from 1899 to 1909. His work in those years also involved the origin of Gulf Coast salt domes.
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| Charles Schuchert
(1858-1942). Schuchert never received an academic degree and in fact never finished high school. He nonethless went from working in his father's furniture factory to serving as Ulrich's lithographer to working as an assistant to Hall at the New York State Museum to being Curator of the U.S. National Museum from 1894 to1904 and then Professor of paleontology at Yale University from 1904 to 1923, serving as chairman of the Yale Geology Department from 1909 to 1921.
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| 8. | |
| Edward Oscar Ulrich (1857-1944; German Wallace and Baldwin College, Berea, Ohio (1874-1876), no degree; later honorary A.M. (1886) and Ph.D. (1892) from same institution) His research dealt with a remarkable range of Paleozoic invertebrate fossils. He was curator for the Cincinnati Society of Natural History from 1877 to 1881, paleontologist for a variety of geological surveys in the Midwest from 1885 to 1896, and geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey from 1897 to 1932. He was president of the Paleontological Society in 1915. He won the Geological Society of America's Penrose Medal in 1932 and the National Academy of Science's Mary Clark Thompson Medal in 1930. His mentor at the Cincinnati Society of Natural History was R. M. Byrnes.
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| John Mason Clarke
(1857-1925; B.S. Amherst College, 1877). After his degree at Amherst, he studied at the University of Göttingen in Germany but was never able to finish his Ph.D. work there. He was professor of geology and mineralogy at Smith College, 1881-1884, then professor at Amherst. In 1886 he became Assistant Paleontologist of the state of New York. On James Hall's death in 1898, he became State Paleontologist of New York, and in 1904 he became State Geologist of New York. From 1894 onwards he was also a professor at Resselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. (See C. Schuchert (1925), Bull. GSA, 37, p. 49-93.)
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| Henry Shaler Williams (1847-1918; Ph.D. Yale University, 1871). A professor of Paleontology at Cornell, he is perhaps most famous in the geological community for proposing the "Pennsylvanian System" as the name for rocks equivalent in age to the Upper Carboniferous of Britain. He was president of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, from 1895 to 1901. His advisor is hypothesized to have been James Dwight Dana, who in turn studied under Benjamin Silliman Sr. (see below). | ![]() |
| James Hall
(1811-1898; B.N.S. Rensselaer School, 1832; M.A. Rensselaer School (Resselaer Polytechnic Institute), 1832). Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 1832- and Chief Geologist of the State of New York 1839-. He was also briefly state geologist for Iowa (1855) and Wisconsin (1857) and contibuted to the geological surveys of Vermont (1844), Minnesota (1859), and Canada. He was director of the New York State Museum at Albany from 1866 to 1894, and it was in that role that he recruited Charles Schuchert, or at least Schuchert's brachiopod collection, to Albany.
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| 9. | |
| Benjamin Kendall Emerson (1843-1932; Undergraduate degree from Amherst 1865; Ph.D., University of Göttingen, ca. 1870). His dissertation was "Die Liasmulde von Markoldendorf bei Einbeck" ("The early Jurassic Markoldendorf Basin near Einbeck", a town north of Göttingen). He was a professor at Amherst and at Smith, and much of his work concerned the geology of New England. He was president of the Geological Society of America in 1899 and 1900 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For more, see F. B. Loomis (1933), Bull. GSA, 44, p. 317-325, and A. C. Lane (1933), Proc. AAAS, 68, p. 625-67. His mentor is not known.
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| Adolph von Koenen (Ph.D., University of Berlin, 1865). Most of his research was concerned with fossil molluscs in northern Germany. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Science. His collections are still housed in the Paleotontology Institute of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. His mentor may have been someone named Bergmann.
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| Amos Eaton (1776-1842; B.A. Williams College, 1799). Eaton began his working life as a lawyer and land agent in Catskill, New York., but he was framed in a forgery trial in 1811 and was sentenced to life in prison. He studied science while in prison until 1817, when he was pardoned by New York Governor Dewitt Clinton. He then studied at Yale for a year with Benjamin Silliman and Eli Ives. After teaching at Williams, he was a travelling lecturer for the next few years, and completed a geological survey of the Albany area thanks to the funding of Stephen Van Rensselaer. This survey established Eaton as one of the foremost geologists in America, and he has been called the "Father of American Geology".
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| 10. | |
| Benjamin Silliman, Sr. (1779-1864; B.A. Yale College, 1796; also studied at the University of Edinburgh). Silliman was professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at Yale from 1802 to 1853, and in fact was the first professor of those subjects in the U.S. He was the founder of the American Journal of Science. Silliman College and the mineral sillimanite were named after him. His students included Amos Eaton and James Dwight Dana (1833). .
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| Eli Ives ( (1779-1861) Professor of medicine and botany at Yale. Ives was the first physician to teach a course in pediatrics in America. He was also noted for his vast knowledge of indigenous medical herbs, about which he taught in his course on Materia Medica. His mentor was Eneas Munson (see below)
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| 11. | |
| James Woodhouse (1770-1809; M.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1792). He was trained in chemistry and medicine but became enthused with geology, which he taught along with medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the Chemical Society of Philadelphia, the first such society in the world. A vice-president of that organization characterized Woodhouse's role in chemistry as "a strenuous vindicator of its doctrines [and] a liberal inquirer after truth, an elegant and successful experimenter." Woodhouse's geological work included a chemical analysis of basalts from North Carolina. At his death, his mineral collection was donated to the American Philosophical Society.
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| Eneas Munson, Sr. (1734-1826; B.A. Yale College, 1753) After graduation from Yale, Munson studied divinity but his career as a minister was short, both because he became ill and because his reputation as a wit and prankster did not jibe well with the character of a minister. He then studied medicine with the Rev. John Derbe, a graduate of Yale, in Long Island. In 1760 he moved to New Haven. He was one of the founders of the New Haven County Medical Association and played a major role in securing the charter of the Connecticut Medical Society. He served as the Society's president from 1794 to 1801. The Society conferred an honorary M.D. on him in 1801.
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This table continues from the 12th to 17th generations on a second page.
The construction of this table drew heavily on the Academic Genealogy of Brown University's Planetary Geology Group webpage by Christopher D. Cooper. Construction of this page also drew on the Lefalophodon - An Informal History of Evolutionary Biology Web Site, the Yale Peabody Museum Who's Who, and the "genealogical pages" of the University of Iliinois School of Chemistry. Many of the pictures are from the Brown web page. The paintings of Hall and Eaton are from a USGS Collection. The picture of Field and his Pullman car is from Dott (2001, GSA Bull. 113: 996-1009)
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