The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to a University of Iowa assistant professor to study the ways migration influenced family networks over centuries.

Caglar Koylu’s project will create a population-scale data set that links about 40 million people in crowd-sourced family trees to their common ancestors. The research will use that data to study how migration influenced the geographic proximity of kin and reveal the conditions that favor large groups of related families, and conditions that favor dispersion. It also will focus on kinship networks and their evolution over geographic space and time.

“Specifically, this project assesses how much migration contributed to the development of different types of networks and how this relationship changed as different locations were settled by different groups,” says Koylu, an assistant professor in the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences.

The award exceeds $477,000 over three years.