Finding a research supervisor relevant to your research interests for your studies (Internship, MSc, PhD, Postdoc) is a really painful three step process requiring a great deal of planification and organisation [1]:

  1. It requires to identify your own research interests, what you are passionate about.

  2. It is, then, necessary to identify relevant academics within institutions and selecting a list of potential supervisors after careful examination of their publications to better understand their area of expertise.

  3. Finally, you can contact them to get a meeting, by writing an email putting into perspective your research interests and your background with those of the selected potential supervisors.

Generally, those three steps are time consuming in practice especially given the high number of researcher profiles to browse. For instance, a student who wants to perform a PhD in Computer Science in Canada has to scrutinize 1500+ [2] researcher profiles across canadian university websites.

Browsing all that information is nearly impossible and most students use shortcuts and heuristics to find relevant supervisors by attending conferences and notifying their interests to people in their local research community. If they’re lucky, their network can bring them a great opportunity. However, for most students it is not the case and waiting for a hypothetical call or email is just not realistic. This is the reason why we decided to develop a search engine researchout.com/supervisors that will help you find researchers with profiles matching your research interests in a few clicks.

How can researchout.com/supervisors help you?

  • Enter your research interests in your favorite location (country or region) and find relevant supervisors. The search engine will provide you both a list of correlated research interests and a list of relevant supervisors in the selected location.

  • Navigate through researcher expertise by looking at the scientific publications and profile details.

  • Engage the selected potential supervisors by sending an email and start discussing about your potential collaboration.

[1] Jafree DJ, Whitehurst K, Rajmohan S. How to approach supervisors for research opportunities. Ann Med Surg (Lond). 2016;10:110‐112. Published 2016 Jan 22. doi:10.1016/j.amsu.2016.01.022

[2] Raw estimate based on the average number of professors in computer science departments