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November 24

Who was the academic advisor for this dissertation?

Swan E. F. (1942). The pathway of calcium from sea-water to the tubes of the serpulidae (polychaeta) (dissertation). OCLC 18264843

I don't have institutional access to this paper. The abstract doesn't tell me who the advisor was (some do, this one doesn't, perhaps due to its age). Can anyone check to see? The author is Emery Frederick Swan (1916-2001), zoology professor at the University of New Hampshire. I'm trying to track down all of the notable students who studied with S. F. Light and it's not easy. Viriditas (talk) 05:50, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This Ph.D. Thesis appears to exist only in printed form, held at two libraries of UCB, the Marian Koshland Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library, located on the main campus in Berkeley, and the Northern Regional Library Facility, located on the grounds of UCB's Richmond Field Station. Someone who works at UCB could check this. --Lambiam 09:46, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Any indication that Swan took classes from Light? Viriditas (talk) 20:15, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, see here:

Among those who studied with Dr. Light at Moss Beach were Paul Illg, University of Washington; Frank Pitelka, University of California; Olga Hartman, University of Southern California; Emery Swan, University of New Hampshire; Cadet Hand, University of California; Ralph Smith, University of California; and Joel Hedgpeth, University of California. Thus Moss Beach represents for many of these well known scientists their first significant marine biology experience.^[1]

It is fully conceivable, though, that Swan had a different advisor if Light thought the specialized topic of the thesis research, cell signaling, was not his area of expertise. --Lambiam 23:42, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, but I already went down that rabbit hole, and unfortunately, that link is wrong. The person who uploaded that material was citing Oxley, Bart; Breen Bob; Conradson, Diane R.; Welch, Virgina B. (1999). The Natural History of the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. Friends of Fitzgerald Marine Life Refuge. ISBN 09667616CX. OCLC 42388197. I don't have access to check it directly, but the material up above is misleading and incorrect. For example, when they say "among those who studied with Dr. Light at Moss Beach", what I discovered was that they didn't actually mean with, as in these people were with him at Moss Beach studying zoology. What they really meant, was that these people studied marine biology at Moss Beach just like Light did. I figured this out last week, and I had to delete the above material from two different articles because it turns out that some of those people were not actually studying with Light, but came around later to Moss Beach for other research purposes (Smith, Pitelka, and Hand for example). I was able to confirm independently that Illg, Hartman, and Hedgpeth were right there on the beach next to Light, so they remain in my articles. I could not confirm or verify that Swan was a student of Light's, however, so this leaves me back to my original predicament, hence this refdesk posting. Viriditas (talk) 23:55, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]