Brazilian scientists have been contributing to the protozoology field for more than
100 years with important discoveries of new species such asTrypanosoma
cruzi and Leishmania spp. In this work, we used a
Brazilian thesis database (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education
Personnel) covering the period from 1987-2011 to identify researchers who contributed
substantially to protozoology. We selected 248 advisors by filtering to obtain
researchers who supervised at least 10 theses. Based on a computational analysis of
the thesis databases, we found students who were supervised by these scientists. A
computational procedure was developed to determine the advisors’ scientific ancestors
using the Lattes Platform. These analyses provided a list of 1,997 researchers who
were inspected through Lattes CV examination and allowed the identification of the
pioneers of Brazilian protozoology. Moreover, we investigated the areas in which
researchers who earned PhDs in protozoology are now working. We found that 68.4% of
them are still in protozoology, while 16.7% have migrated to other fields. We
observed that support for protozoology by national or international agencies is
clearly correlated with the increase of scientists in the field. Finally, we
described the academic genealogy of Brazilian protozoology by formalising the
“forest” of Brazilian scientists involved in the study of protozoa and their vectors
over the past century.