What we collect, and who can see it.

ResearchBridge is an independent product that connects students with open research positions at their university. It is operated by the ResearchBridge team and is not owned by, or an official service of, any university.

For any question about this policy, or to make a request about your information, write to hello@myresearchbridge.com from the address on your account.

Account information, which is required to use ResearchBridge:

• Your institutional email address, which is also how you sign in.
• The institution your email domain belongs to.
• Your role on ResearchBridge, which is student, researcher, or administrator.

Student profile information, which you control and can edit or leave blank:

• Name, preferred name, program, faculty, specialization, year of study, and expected graduation year.
• Relevant coursework, skills and self-reported proficiency, and research interests.
• Previous research experience, including organization, supervisor, dates, and what you did.
• Availability, including hours per week, semesters, start date, and location preference.
• Academic standing, which is optional. Both the value and the scale it was measured on are stored.
• A resume or transcript, if you choose to upload one.

Researcher profile information:

• Name, role, title, faculty, department, lab or research group, and websites you provide.
• A short biography shown to students on your listings.
• Your research areas.

Application information:

• Your written answers to the questions a researcher wrote for that specific position.
• Files you attach to that application.
• A snapshot of your profile as it stood when you submitted, so later profile edits do not rewrite what a researcher already received.

Waitlist information, if you join before creating an account: your name, email, program or department, year or title, and the research areas you describe.

• Sign-in records, including when a verification code was requested and when a session began.
• Application status history, which records every change and who made it.
• Criterion evaluations, which record how your application related to the criteria a researcher set.
• Administrative audit records, such as researcher approvals and listing moderation.
• Pilot analytics events, such as an application being submitted, used to measure whether the pilot works.

We do not use advertising trackers, third-party analytics scripts, or advertising cookies. The only cookie ResearchBridge sets is the one that keeps you signed in.

Researchers can see a student profile and application material when that student applies to a position the researcher controls. Researchers cannot browse a directory of students, cannot see applications submitted to anyone else, and cannot see a student who has not applied to them.

Students never see a researcher private note. Notes are visible only to the researcher who wrote them and are excluded from data exports.

Administrators can see account records, listings, and aggregate pilot statistics in order to approve researcher accounts, moderate listings, and report on the pilot. The administrator view of applications deliberately excludes written answers, uploaded files, and researcher notes.

Student profiles are not published publicly and are not indexed by search engines. Signed-in areas of the product are excluded from indexing.

Exact conditions, such as whether your stated weekly availability meets a minimum, whether a listed course appears on your profile, and what year of study you are in, are evaluated by ResearchBridge code. No language model is involved in those checks.

For written material, ResearchBridge sends the specific application text, the relevant profile fields, and the criteria the researcher wrote to the Claude API, operated by Anthropic. Its only task is to locate evidence relating to those criteria and point at the passage it came from. We send only what that task requires. We do not send authentication secrets, verification codes, private researcher notes, or profile fields unrelated to the analysis.

The model does not decide who is accepted, shortlisted, or declined, and it does not produce a score, ranking, or recommendation. For positions that may constitute paid employment, automated ordering of candidates is disabled entirely. A human researcher makes every decision.

The model is instructed never to infer or comment on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, health status, political belief, age beyond a legitimate program requirement, socioeconomic background, immigration status, or family circumstances, and never to treat a name, photo, accent, or writing style as a signal of background. Its output is validated against a fixed schema before a researcher sees it.

You can ask for the automated evidence recorded on your own application to be explained. Write to hello@myresearchbridge.com and we will describe what was recorded and why.

ResearchBridge runs on Railway, which hosts the application and its PostgreSQL database. Written material sent for evidence analysis is processed by Anthropic. Transactional email, such as verification codes and application notifications, is delivered through an email provider. These providers process information on our behalf in order to run the service.

Hosting may be located outside your country. If that matters for your circumstances, contact us before creating an account.

• Verification codes expire after ten minutes and can be used once.
• Sign-in sessions expire after thirty days, and signing out ends them immediately.
• Applications, their status history, and pilot outcome records are kept for the duration of the pilot so historical records stay accurate.
• Opportunities that already have applications are closed or archived rather than deleted, so applicants keep a record of what they applied to.
• Waitlist entries are kept until the pilot ends or you ask us to remove them.

• Most profile fields are optional. Academic standing, a resume, and a transcript are never required to use ResearchBridge.
• You can edit or clear profile information at any time from your profile page.
• You can withdraw an application at any point.
• You can ask for a copy of your information, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account.
• You can ask to be removed from the waitlist without creating an account.

To make a request, write to hello@myresearchbridge.com from the address on your account. We aim to respond within thirty days. Where deleting information would destroy a record another person relies on, such as an application a researcher has already reviewed, we will explain what can be removed and what has to be kept.

Sign-in uses one-time codes rather than passwords. Codes are stored only as a keyed hash, expire after ten minutes, can be used once, allow five incorrect attempts, and are rate limited per address. Session tokens are random values stored as hashes and delivered in a cookie that scripts on the page cannot read.

Access is checked on the server for every page and every action, rather than by hiding links. File downloads are authorized per file. Uploads are limited by size and file type.

No system is perfectly secure. If you find a vulnerability, please report it to hello@myresearchbridge.com before disclosing it publicly, and we will work with you on a fix.

ResearchBridge is intended for university students, researchers, and staff. It is not directed at children, and accounts require an institutional email address.

ResearchBridge does not hold SOC 2, HIPAA, FERPA, or PIPEDA certification, and does not claim official approval or endorsement from any university. Any such statement will appear here only once it is true and verified.

If we change how information is collected or shared in a way that affects you, we will update the date at the top of this page and, for material changes, notify account holders by email. Continuing to use ResearchBridge after a change means the updated policy applies.

See also the Terms of Service and the Accessibility statement.