I’ve been hunting all over the interweb looking for Professors that have blogs. While it would be a good thing if there were more, (see the science blogging challenge 2008), there are surprising amount of big boffins that already blog. I should say that by big, I mean (full) professor. By boffin I mean a person practicing science including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering and hell, even computer “science” and the “dismal science” of economics too. By blog I mean, a web-log or a lab-log which is personal, frequently updated (with web feed) and allows comments. Here is my collection of big boffins with blogs, with a little help from friendfeed.com [1]. It is ordered alphabetically by surname and I hope it gives a flavour of some of the bloggers out there on the Web. If you know any more, please let me know.
| Professor | University | Discipline | Blog |
|---|---|---|---|
| Russ Altman | Stanford University | Bioinformatics | Building Confidence |
| Gary Becker | University of Chicago | Economics (Nobel laureate) | Becker Posner blog |
| Tim Berners-Lee | University of Southampton (also some place called MIT too) | Web Science (is it really a Science?) | Tim Bloggers-Lee |
| Jonathan Butterworth | University College London | Physics (and life) | Life and Physics |
| David Colquhoun | University College London | Pharmacology | DC’s Improbable Science |
| Stephen Curry | Imperial College London | Biophysics and Crystallograpy | Reciprocal Space |
| Brian Derby | University of Manchester | Materials Science | Title to be announced |
| David De Roure | University of Southampton | Computer Science | e-Research @ OpenWetWare |
| Bill Dutton | University of Oxford | Internet Studies | William H. Dutton @ Oxford Internet Institute |
| Sean Eddy | HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus | Biological sequence analysis | Cryptogenomicon |
| Jonathan Eisen | University of California, Davis | Evolutionary biology | Tree of Life |
| Michael Eisen | University of California, Berkeley | Genomics, gene regulation etc | it is NOT junk: a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things |
| Ian Foster | Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago | Grid and Cloud computing | http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/ |
| Mark Gerstein | Yale University | Bioinformatics and Biochemistry | TextStream |
| Timothy Gowers | University of Cambridge | Mathematics (Fields medallist) | Gower’s weblog |
| Steve Haake | Sheffield Hallam University | Sports Engineering | Engineering Sport |
| Alon Halevy | University of Google / Washington | Computer Science and Engineering, databases, data mining etc | alonhalevy.blogspot.com |
| Jim Hendler | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Tetherless world |
| Tony Hey | Microsoft | Physics, Computer Science | MSDN blogs |
| Greg Hickok and David Poeppel | UC Irvine and NYU | Neural organization of language | Talking Brains |
| Andrew Jaffe | Imperial College London | Astrophysics | Leaves on the Line |
| Richard Jones | University of Sheffield, UK | Nanotechnology | Soft Machines |
| Douglas Kell | University of Manchester, UK | Systems Biology, Biochemistry | blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk |
| Andy Lawrence | University of Edinburgh (currrently on sabbatical at Stanford) | Astronomy | The e-Astronomer: The Universe, the Internet, and Academic Life |
| Lawrence Lessig | Stanford Law School | Economics, law, copyright, creative commons etc | http://www.lessig.org/blog/ |
| Steven Levitt | University of Chicago | Economics | Freakonomics at the New York Times |
| Greg Mankiw | Harvard University | Economics | Greg Mankiw’s Blog |
| Laurence Moran | University of Toronto | Biochemistry | Sandwalk: Strolling with a skeptical biochemist |
| Peter Murray-Rust | University of Cambridge | Chemistry and informatics | A Scientist and the Web |
| Roderic Page | University of Glasgow | Taxonomy, Evolutionary Biology etc | iPhylo, iSpecies and bioGUID |
| Massimo Pigliucci | Stonybrook, New York | Biology and Philosophy | Rationally speaking |
| Henry Rzepa | Imperial College London | Computational Chemistry and Cheminformatics | Chemistry with a twist |
| Stephen Quake | Stanford University | Bioengineering | Stephen Quake guest columnist at Olivia Judson’s New York Times blog |
| Pamela Ronald | University of California, Davis | Plant genomics and pathology | Tomorrow’s Table |
| Steven Salzberg | University of Maryland, College Park | Bioinformatics, Genomics etc | Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience |
| Stuart Shieber | Harvard University | Computer Science etc. | The Occasional Pamphlet on scholarly communication |
| Barry Smith | University at Buffalo, New York State | Ontology, Philsophy, OBOlogy | HL7-watch.blogspot.com |
| Terence Tao | University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) | Mathematics (Fields medallist) | What’s new |
| Carl Wieman | University of British Columbia | Physics (Nobel laureate) | Scientific Blogging |
| Richard Wiseman | University of Hertfordshire | Psychology | Richard Wiseman Blog |
| Semir Zeki | University College London | Neurobiology | Prof Zeki’s musings |
(Some blogs also worth mentioning, not by full Professors (yet), but prominent scientists include Ensembl Web Log (Ewan Birney etc), Nicolas Le Novère, Christoph Steinbeck, John Overington, Jean-Claude Bradley, Alex Bateman and The Pfam and Rfam team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, Cameron Neylon, Hervé This, Casey Bergman and Luis von Ahn)
Professor Blogger, Free University of the Web, The Internet
We already have quite a few Professors blogging, but there is room for plenty more, so I’m hassling all the Professors I know to ask them if they have thought of starting a blog. Now, some people have argued that blogging is the new email, and that in ten years time every Professor will have a blog, just like every Professor has an email address now. I’m not so sure about that but I do agree with climate change blogger Gavin Schmidt, who says “scientists know much more about their field than is ever published in peer-reviewed journals. Blogs can be a good medium with which to disseminate this tacit knowledge” [2].
With all these Professors blogging, and many more to come, does that mean the Web will become a University?
References
- Various (2008). , friendfeed.com
- Gavin Schmidt (2008). Nature Geoscience, 1(4):208. DOI:10.1038/ngeo170
- Various (2008). discussion of this post over at friendfeed
- Peter J. Denning (2005). Is computer science science? Communications of the ACM, 48(4):27-31. DOI:10.1145/1053291.1053309
- Jim Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee and Danny Weitzner (2008). Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web. Communications of the ACM, 51(7):60-69. DOI:10.1145/1364782.1364798
Picture of Jeffrey Bates (top right) © All rights reserved by Julian Cash from his Perl Gurus set. I’ve probably infringed the copyright by reproducing it here, but I can’t resist using such a great picture.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
O'Really? 
One more for you: Professor Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge (computer security): http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/
Comment by Andrew Walkingshaw — September 12, 2008 @ 4:31 pm |
Impressed to see two Fields Medallist mathematicians up there. I guess the hunt for a blogging Nobel Prize winner goes on, though.
And any other FRSes there apart from David Colquhoun and Tim Gowers?
Comment by draust — September 12, 2008 @ 7:19 pm |
And (appropriately) Tim Berners-Lee appears to have a blog, though rather an inactive one:
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4
Comment by draust — September 12, 2008 @ 7:44 pm |
Semir Zeki: http://profzeki.blogspot.com/
Comment by Mo — September 14, 2008 @ 10:08 pm |
@Andrew Light Blue Touchpaper is an intersting blog, but as far as I can tell, none of the posts there are authored by Ross Anderson.
@DrAust thanks for reminding me of Tim, I’ve added him now
@Mo ditto
Comment by Duncan — September 15, 2008 @ 9:08 am |
Ian Foster (of Grid fame) is another professor with a blog – see http://ianfoster.typepad.com/
— Dave (thinking about it!)
Comment by David De Roure — September 15, 2008 @ 10:01 pm |
Gary Becker is a blogging Nobelist in economics.
Comment by Michael Nielsen — September 16, 2008 @ 12:28 am |
Thanks, Michael, I’ve added Becker now. I think this list is always going to be incomplete and out of date, and I won’t be able to maintain it forever…
Comment by Duncan — September 16, 2008 @ 9:54 am |
In case you still intend to maintian it: Alon Halevy (database VIP) has a blog http://alonhalevy.blogspot.com/, so does Barry Smith http://hl7-watch.blogspot.com/
Comment by marijke keet — December 17, 2008 @ 11:35 am |
Thanks Marijke, I didn’t know about those, have added them now. I wonder if this list will ever get too big to manage?
Comment by Duncan — December 17, 2008 @ 4:11 pm |
if the blogging really is catching on with the professors, then maybe you can make a mini-ontology with disciplines and main topics, affiliations of the prof etc to make it into a semantic search instead of browsable table 😉
Comment by keet — December 19, 2008 @ 11:45 am |
[…] all Duncan’s fault. For years I’ve known he lives in that other dimension, the parallel universe that is the […]
Pingback by Reasons to be Blogging 1 2 3 | e-Research — January 4, 2009 @ 9:45 am |
Richard Jones (FRS), Sheffield writes an excellent blog on nanoscience and nanotechnology – Soft Machines .
Best wishes,
Philip
Comment by Philip Moriarty — February 20, 2009 @ 5:31 pm |
Thanks Philip, I’ve added Richard to the list…
Comment by Duncan — February 20, 2009 @ 5:43 pm |
This one by David Poeppl and Greg hickok is very cool
http://talkingbrains.blogspot.com/
Comment by Fabiana Kubke — June 16, 2009 @ 10:26 am |
You have managed to overlook the two most known economists with blogs:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ (Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize 2008; one of Time magazine’s top 25 blogs, together with Freakonomics).
http://www.bepress.com/ev/ (The Economist’s Voice, edited by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize 2001).
Other interesting economists’ blogs:
Brad de Long: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/
Mark Thoma: http://economistsview.typepad.com/ (which also includes a very comprehensive list of economists blogs on the right side column).
Comment by Luis — August 6, 2009 @ 9:38 am |
Here’s another one for you:
http://www.andrewjaffe.net/blog/
Astrophys prof at Imperial
Comment by Stephen Curry — July 23, 2010 @ 4:28 pm |
If you’re wondering about the increased traffic, you got tweeted by @sciencegoddess.
Although I qualify as a “professor that has a blog”, mine doesn’t have anything to do with science.
Comment by Andre — July 28, 2010 @ 4:24 pm |