Help: Writing Your Academic Bio

Writing Your Academic Bio – Introduce Yourself

A "Research Summary" or academic biography states your prior achievements, current work, and the proposal for upcoming research. It should include your prior work, your current aims and findings, and speak about your future goals. To be effective, we advise you to split your homepage into these three areas – each in a different textbox (with distinct titles). In these you should consider referring to some of the following topics:

• Major problem(s) you wish to attack. Emphasize what excites you about your research and try to point your added value to the field.
• Where appropriate, acknowledge prior contributions to the field and state explicitly where you expand on the work of others.
• Clearly state what's the problem’s relevance to the field.
• Specify your specific goals for a 3-5 year period, including potential outcomes.
• If you know what a particular funding agency funds, you can name the agency and briefly outline a proposal. This might convince the reader that you are on the way to getting a project funded.
• At the same time, you should have research goals that have broad enough goals so that if one topic doesn't get funded there are other areas on which you can work.

Remember, you should try presenting your academic biography concisely and clearly. 300-800 words should be enough to introduce the best of you to interested parties and colleagues.

Good Luck!