Unlocking a Family Legacy
Bill Cheadle's gift helps digitize his father's extraordinary botanical collection
As a child, Bill Cheadle sailed around the world on an ocean liner with his parents, Vernon and Mary. The family voyaged from San Francisco to Fiji, Australia, South Africa, Portugal, and London on his father’s Fulbright Fellowship to collect plants. They eventually returned to California, where Vernon would serve as the second chancellor of UC Santa Barbara from 1962–1977.
Vernon Cheadle pressed or pickled 15,000 plants on that trip alone. He also made 70,000 slides of microscopic plant structures. UC Santa Barbara’s Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration is home to his lifetime collection. In 2026, Bill’s support helped the center purchase a high-resolution scanning microscope to help digitize his father’s complex collection.
A process that would have taken decades will now be completed in years. Unlike traditional microscopes, this new instrument automates the process. Researchers can load six slides at once. A computer-controlled stage moves across each slide, photographing tissue and stitching the images into a single detailed scan. A full set can be scanned in 10 minutes. The microscope accommodates unconventional specimens, like whole leaves and historic glass lantern slides.
Read a Q&A with the scanning team to learn more about the microscope and project
“In addition to being an administrator, my father was a botanist throughout his career. I really wanted to get his collections and others digitized. This scanning microscope — one of three in California — will allow the Cheadle Center to digitize his and other collections at a rapid rate. Any scientist anywhere in the world can go online and apply today’s technology to specimens that were collected 60-70 years ago,” said Bill.
Each Cheadle Collection specimen is meticulously labeled. Collections with this level of documentation are rare across the United States, making this one a valuable resource for research and preservation.
“Historically, people would make many tissue sections on microscope slides — take a root and make a ton of sections, then pick a couple for publication. Those slides still contain a huge amount of data that wasn't digitized. We are sitting on a massive dataset that we can now analyze with machine learning programs to learn new things,” said Assistant Professor Jesús Martínez-Gómez, who is leading the current effort.
Bill’s commitment to UC Santa Barbara is part of a broader family legacy, reflected in his service as a UC Santa Barbara Foundation trustee and his longstanding involvement with the Cheadle Center and its collections. By establishing an endowment for the Cheadle Center, Bill ensured its existence for future plant biologists.
“Dad always said that great universities attract great faculty, who attract great students. Right before he passed away, UC Santa Barbara was admitted to the Association of American Universities. There are only 71 universities in that elite organization. That was one of his major career goals,” said Bill.
During his childhood on campus, Bill watched his mother and father work as a team.
“What I learned is that science drives technology, which drives more science, and certainly drives medicine. Growing up here, I was exposed to all these incredibly brilliant people. I tried to soak in as much as I could,” said Bill.
“As director of the Cheadle Center, I see Bill Cheadle’s impact every day. I see it in the one million specimens we care for, the fantastic students we train, and the 350+ acres of campus natural areas we restore and steward. Bill has continued Vernon and Mary Cheadle’s legacy through his personal interest in the center and his commitment to ensuring that we have the tools needed to remain at the forefront of biodiversity research. I am especially grateful that he understands collections are not static archives; they are an active research infrastructure that becomes more valuable as new technologies emerge. Our high-resolution scanning microscope allows us to create detailed, measurable images of specimens, including structures too small to examine effectively with conventional photography, and share them with researchers and students anywhere in the world. Bill’s support is helping us connect the Cheadle family’s historic investment in UCSB’s collections with an innovative and accessible future,” said Katja Seltmann, Katherine Esau Director of the Cheadle Center.
Dad always said that great universities attract great faculty, who attract great students. Right before he passed away, UC Santa Barbara was admitted to the Association of American Universities. There are only 71 universities in that elite organization. That was one of his major career goals.
UC Santa Barbara Foundation Trustee Bill Cheadle
A Conversation With the Scanning Team
Go behind the scenes of Cheadle Collection digitization
Jennifer Thorsch
Cheadle Center Director Emeritus & Research Affiliate, Botanical Collections
Jesús Martínez-Gómez
Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology
Thorsch: I earned my Ph.D. with Katherine Esau, and after graduation, Dr. Cheadle hired me to be his lab director. I worked with Dr. Cheadle from 1981–1995. Esau and Cheadle had extensive light microscope slide collections that needed to be curated. I received funding from the Pauley Foundation in 2000 to curate the entire microscope collection and all the associated data collected with it: location, herbarium specimens, wet collection, and so forth.
I completed about 80% of the curation before I retired, but the infrastructure for databasing a collection of this size wasn't available. I had proposed to image the light microscope slides and partner those with all the data. If I had started that imaging on the standard light microscope that we had, I probably wouldn't have outlived the time it would have taken. It would take 10+ years of full-time work to try to image just the slide collection.
Martínez-Gómez: I am an evolutionary biologist from Washington State. I really like working with plants because they are great systems to investigate fundamental questions about the processes of plant biology. I got my Ph.D. at Cornell and then did a postdoc at UC Berkeley. I first learned about this collection in preparation for my job interview here. I had seen on the website that they had the Katherine Esau and Vernon Cheadle collection. If you talk to any plant biologist, Esau's book, The Anatomy of Seed Plants, is the Bible of plant anatomy. It had always been on a bookshelf near me throughout my training.
I asked to talk with the folks at the Cheadle Center during my interview, and I was taken by how well-curated and well-organized the collections are. Shortly thereafter, I met Jennifer and we started talking about efforts to digitize this collection to make it publicly available to researchers.
Martínez-Gómez: One of the key goals of biology is to understand how things grow. As animals, we go from a single cell to complex multicellular individuals, and plants do the same thing, continuing to grow throughout their lifespan. Understanding those processes informs applied research, such as agriculture, where we constantly attempt to generate new plant varieties that survive better under heat tolerance or drought stress. All of the properties that make them better able to do that are developmental and cellular, so it is important to understand these processes at the cellular level.
In the age of AI, we can handle a larger amount of data. Historically, people would make many tissue sections on microscope slides — take a root and make a ton of sections, then pick a couple for publication. Those slides still contain a huge amount of data that wasn't digitized. We are sitting on a massive dataset that we can now analyze with machine learning programs to learn new things
Martínez-Gómez: The optics of light microscopy haven't changed too much, but the real advent of this scope is the stage, the housing that holds the microscope slide. It is a remote stage that communicates with a computer. You load a tray with six slides at a time. The microscope objective takes high-quality images of a small bit of tissue, moves the stage, takes another image, and rasters them together to generate a complete compiled image.
Depending on the zoom setting, it can do a set of six slides in about 10 minutes, making it super fast. Doing this process manually would have been prohibitively slow. The other nice thing is that we can image non-standard slides, such as larger slides containing a whole leaf or glass lantern slides that were historically used for slide projections.
Thorsch: We have an extensive collection of Vernon Cheadle and Katherine Esau's lantern slides because before 35-millimeter slides, this was how they presented images for talks. They would take a photograph with their microscope, enlarge it, and mount it on glass. The quality of those lantern slides is outstanding, and they were meticulous in labeling them so we know exactly which collections they came from. That is why this collection is so valuable: There is no guessing about specimens.
Martínez-Gómez: Collections like this are rare across the US. Once we lay down this digital and physical infrastructure, our vision is to continue expanding by taking in new collections from other researchers, starting within the UC system.
Thorsch: Another opportunity we are interested in is hosting visiting researchers on sabbatical or summer opportunities to work with the collection. If they take additional higher-magnification images, we can add those to our database.
Martínez-Gómez: With biodiversity collections, we are stewards of publicly available data. Making them accessible often leads to innovative research and new uses that we didn't originally anticipate. For example, herbarium specimens collected starting in the 1600s with the purpose to name new species are now used to extract DNA. Once this anatomy collection is publicly available and researchers know how to interact with it, we hope new, innovative research will emerge.
Published October 2026