add historical snippet

README.md

@@ -8,7 +8,18 @@ Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford, UK.
 
 Our research is focused primarily on medical imaging and computational biology.
 
-Historical note: Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) was a Flemish cartographer, and the first to use the word 
+Gerardus started as Dr. Ramón Casero's personal project in Jan 2009 as a way to keep track of his research 
+software while working as a post-doc in Oxford under Prof. Grau, Prof. Peter Kohl and Dr. Jürgen Schneider. 
+The project started with some code that he had developed the previous years for his DPhil thesis at Oxford, 
+and was intially hosted in a GoogleCode internal subversion repository. From Oct 2014, it became more of a 
+group project with collaborations from other post-docs (Dr. Darryl McClymont, Dr. Valentina Carapella) and 
+students (Joanne Bates, Christopher Kelly, Ben Villard, Tasos Papastylianou) in the group. In Apr 2015 the 
+project migrated to github, as a repository in Ramón's account (https://github.com/rcasero/gerardus). 
+Between Nov 2015 - Apr 2016 the project was led by Darryl, while Ramón was on leave. On 10 Jul 2016, the 
+repository moved to the "vigente" organization account (https://github.com/vigente/gerardus), so that
+it would be less of a personal project.
+
+Trivia: Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) was a Flemish cartographer, and the first to use the word 
 "atlas" to describe a collection of maps.
 
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