New Faculty: Building a Research Profile People Remember
A first-year plan for a faculty research profile that students, collaborators and reviewers can actually use. You get a setup order for your university page, ORCID and Google Scholar, and a way to feature two papers with media.
The welcome email arrives with a link to your new faculty profile page. It has your name, your title, an office number and a blank box labeled "Research interests". Prospective students will land there. So will the colleague down the hall who might want to collaborate, and the reviewer on your first grant who wants to know who you are.
Most new faculty fill that box with a list of keywords and move on to teaching prep. That is understandable. It is also the moment when a little effort sets how people find and remember your work for years.
Who Looks at a Faculty Research Profile
Before you write anything, think about who will open the page and what they need in the first thirty seconds:
| Visitor | What they want to know | What answers it |
|---|---|---|
| Prospective graduate students | What do you work on, and are you taking students? | A plain statement of your question and an explicit line about openings |
| Colleagues and possible collaborators | Is there overlap with my work? | Two featured papers with a one-line takeaway each |
| Journalists and press officers | Can this person explain the work clearly? | A short video or audio clip of you explaining one finding |
| Grant and promotion reviewers | Is there a coherent program here? | A research statement that connects the papers into one line of work |
Notice that none of them want a full publication list first. The list matters, but it belongs further down the page or behind a link.
The First-Year Setup Order
A profile is several pages in several places. Doing them in the right order saves you from updating the same thing four times.
Week 1: ORCID
If you do not already have one, register for an ORCID iD before anything else. ORCID describes the iD as a unique, persistent identifier that is free of charge to researchers, connected to an ORCID record. Researchers can choose to connect that record to their affiliations and contributions.
Add your new affiliation now. The iD is persistent, and ORCID's founding principles say it will transcend institutional boundaries, so it is the one link that holds your work together when you move.
Week 2: Google Scholar
Google Scholar Profiles let you list your publications, see who cites them and make the profile public so it may appear when people search your name. Two details matter for new faculty, at the time of writing (October 2026):
- Google recommends signing in with a personal Google account rather than an institutional one, so you can keep the profile for as long as you wish.
- To be eligible for inclusion in Google Scholar search results, a public profile also needs a verified email address at your university or institution. Non-institutional addresses such as gmail.com are not suitable for this.
So use a personal account to own the profile, then add and verify your new university email. If you moved from a postdoc, this is also when to replace the old institutional email. Google also says its matching of articles to authors is automatic and not always accurate, so check the list and remove anything that is not yours.
Weeks 3 to 4: Your University Profile Page
Now write the page that most people will actually land on. Keep the top short:
- Two sentences on the question you work on, written for a smart person outside your field.
- One line on whether you are taking graduate students or postdocs, and how to contact you.
- Two featured papers, each with a one-line plain-language takeaway and a link to the paper of record.
- A short clip of you explaining one finding.
- Links to your ORCID and Google Scholar profiles, then the full publication list.
University profile systems vary a lot in what they let you add. Some take embedded media, many only take text and links. Ask your department's web contact what the template allows before you design anything around video.
Later in the Semester: A Lab or Personal Page
If the university template is restrictive, a simple lab or personal site gives you room for media, a team page and a proper publications section. Our guide to building a lab website publications page that gets read covers the structure.
Picking the Two Featured Papers
New faculty often feature their most cited paper. That is not always the right choice. Feature the two papers that best show the program you want to build over the next five years, even if one is newer and less cited.
A worked example: say you are a new assistant professor in public health whose postdoc work was on air pollution and asthma admissions, and whose new lab will study school ventilation. Feature one postdoc paper that shows your methods and one recent paper (or preprint) that points at the ventilation question. A student reading the page sees where the lab is going, not only where you have been.
For each featured paper, write one sentence a non-specialist could repeat: what you found, in whom, and how sure you are. If you cannot write that sentence, the paper is probably not the one to feature yet.
A Short Clip of You Explaining It
A one to three minute clip does something text cannot: it shows how you explain things. That matters to a student choosing an advisor and to a reporter deciding who to call. Keep it to one finding, say who it applies to, and say what it does not show. A phone on a stack of books and a quiet room are enough to start.
Where Amplify Fits
The hardest part of a new profile is producing media for featured papers while you are also writing lectures. Amplify takes one paper's PDF and generates its formats from that paper and nothing else, with no open-web filler. One order covers one paper and includes:
- A 16:9 video abstract of about 3 minutes.
- A 9:16 vertical short of 45 to 60 seconds, for LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube Shorts and conference screens.
- An audio brief in English, plus 21 more languages on request.
- A one-page, print-ready infographic.
Each format arrives as three variants you can edit line by line, a person reviews every format before release, and nothing goes out until you approve it. Every piece carries the title, the authors and a link back to the paper of record.
For a profile, the widget is the useful part. It is one script tag per page and one marker per paper, and it works anywhere you can paste HTML, including a faculty profile, a lab site or a publication list. Readers can read, listen and ask questions about the paper without leaving your page, and the analytics show reads, listens, questions asked and which format moved people, which is useful later for grant reports. Whether your university profile accepts a script tag depends on its system, so check with your web contact, or put the widget on your lab page and link to it.
Your faculty profile will be read by people deciding whether to work with you long before they meet you. A clear question, two well-chosen papers and your own voice explaining one of them will do more than a perfect publication list.
Quick answers
What should a new faculty research profile page include?
Start with two sentences on the question you work on, a line saying whether you are taking students, and two featured papers, each with a one-line plain-language takeaway and a link to the paper of record. Add a short clip of you explaining one finding and links to your ORCID and Google Scholar profiles. The full publication list can sit further down the page.
Should I create my Google Scholar profile with my university email?
Sign in with a personal Google account and add your university email separately. At the time of writing (October 2026), Google recommends a personal account so you can keep the profile as long as you wish, and says a public profile also needs a verified institutional email to be eligible for Google Scholar search results.
Do I need an ORCID iD as a new faculty member?
It is worth having one. ORCID describes the iD as a unique, persistent identifier that is free of charge to researchers, with a record you can choose to connect to your affiliations and contributions. Because it is persistent and not tied to one institution, it is the one link that keeps your work together across moves.
