Academic Fellows

Why We Built This

Research shapes the future of our society. It creates knowledge that transforms industries, informs policy, and opens possibilities we can't yet imagine. Every piece of research carries value—the question is whether that value reaches the people and problems it could serve.

Institutions work hard to solve this internally, but this isn't a problem any single institution can fix—it requires infrastructure that connects across all of them. There's no system to bridge gaps across organizational boundaries and let knowledge flow naturally toward meaningful collaboration. Research publishes success, but the failures and dead ends that could save others months of work remain invisible. The next researcher stumbles on the same obstacles—not because the solution doesn't exist, but because there's no way to find it.

We experienced and observed this firsthand during our PhD and postdoc journeys at top New Zealand universities. Despite incredible people and support around us, we watched colleagues struggle for months with problems that could have been solved in days—sometimes hours—if they could find the right person or right equipment at the right time. A two-minute conversation that could unlock two months of stuck progress. A survey cohort three minutes away instead of six months out of reach. The expertise was there. The infrastructure to connect it wasn't.

World-class research groups and thousands of talented researchers are doing exceptional work, but expertise remains invisible—scattered across departmental pages, personal websites, and databases. We host hundreds of networking events every year, yet we all know what happens: you talk to people you already know, or meet someone new and forget their name the next day. Where's the system to find who attended an event, discover their expertise, and actually follow up?

That infrastructure didn't exist. We built it.

Academic Fellows is that infrastructure. Every researcher is mapped across 100+ dimensions—expertise, methods, tools, publications, skills, research focus—so you can find exactly who you need, not just who you already know. Your work becomes visible beyond academic circles, and your events don't disappear into LinkedIn posts. Pull your entire audience with one search, discover their capabilities, and follow up meaningfully. Academic Fellows helps you build and manage research groups that span departments and organizations—however you structure them, everything connects at one point. Get discovered for what you actually do, not where you're employed.

The person stuck on your exact problem can find you in minutes, not months. The collaboration that should happen, happens. Knowledge flows across boundaries instead of dying in silos. This is infrastructure built for how research actually works—through connection, knowledge transfer, and accumulated learning. We're creating the system that lets expertise reach the problems it can solve, so research does what it's meant to do: drive meaningful impact.

The Team

Academic Fellows was founded by researchers who experienced these challenges firsthand and decided to build the infrastructure the community needed.

Advisory Board

Our advisors bring diverse perspectives from research, industry, technology, and entrepreneurship. Their profiles are coming soon.