About
Research positions should be findable.
ResearchBridge is a platform that connects students with research opportunities at their university.
Rather than searching faculty pages and sending cold emails to researchers who may not be recruiting, students create a single profile and apply to positions that are currently open.
In the team's experience, many university research positions are filled informally through contacts and word of mouth, which makes them harder to access for students without an existing network. ResearchBridge brings those opportunities together and gives researchers a structured way to find students who fit the needs of a project.
The product is deliberately narrow. It is not a social network, a messaging platform, or a directory of every professor at a university. It is a place where open research positions live, and where an application is written for one specific project.
What we hold to
Four commitments that shape the product.
Relevance belongs to the project, not the student
A student can be an excellent fit for one project and a poor fit for the next. ResearchBridge evaluates every application only in the context of the position it was sent to. There is no universal student score and no leaderboard.
Requirements are stated before anyone applies
Researchers write their own criteria and mark each one required or preferred. Students see those criteria on the listing. Nothing is scored in secret.
The researcher decides
Software can organize an application and point to the passage where something appears. It does not decide who gets a position. For roles that may constitute paid employment, automated ordering of candidates is switched off.
Starting out is normal
Plenty of research positions suit students who have never worked in a lab. Requirements are set per project, and beginner-friendly positions are labelled as such.
The pilot
Starting with one university, then expanding.
The first pilot will run in health and life sciences, with a small number of researchers and students at a single university. Undergraduate and graduate students can both take part, and students use ResearchBridge for free.
ResearchBridge is an independent product. Partner institutions and research groups are not yet confirmed, so none are named here. Nothing on this site should be read as an endorsement by any university.
The architecture already models institutions, email domains, faculties, departments, and grading scales as data, so expansion to further faculties and other universities does not require rebuilding the product.