Research is Cool is a global site that aims to enable more early career researchers worldwide to acquire, develop and make use of their research skills. We do this in two ways:
We help early career researchers find research jobs and postgraduate courses that are suitable for their level of expertise through posting adverts relevant to early career researchers on our free-to-use search database. On this database we advertise both research jobs (e.g. postdoctoral fellowships; research assistant positions) as well as postgraduate courses (e.g. postgraduate studentships, PhDs, Masters courses). We also provide information on scholarships and postgraduate funding, advice on recruitment processes and tips on landing the research jobs and courses you desire.
We offer a range of social networking features that allow researchers at all stages of their career to meet each other and communicate across disciplinary and geographical boundaries; this way early career researchers can discuss their ideas with more senior colleagues and benefit from the kind of networking opportunities that usually only happen at large-scale academic conferences.
Who is this site for?
Anyone that has a keen interest in research, regardless of their discipline or geographical location; we tend to find that most of our users are current or prospective postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers, but we would also encourage others to join us
Academic staff, university human resource departments, and school administrators at universities and other academic institutions seeking to advertise research jobs, studentships, scholarships or academic funding information
Company history
Research is Cool was founded in 2007 by Alexa Ispas, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Before setting up Research is Cool, Alexa had been working on research projects at the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of St. Andrews, Cardiff University, The Scottish Government and the University of Edinburgh.
This wide range of research experiences made Alexa aware of the many difficulties early career researchers face when looking for research vacancies and when seeking like-minded individuals to share their research ideas with, and determined to do something to help.
Setting up Research is Cool took Alexa a very long time, mostly due to lack of funding. She developed the original plans for the company way back in April 2006 - at that time the company was called 'Students into Research' - but it was only in April 2007 that the initial funding needed to pay for building the site came through and the website could be built. The biggest problem came after that - once the website had been paid for, the company had less than £100 in the bank. So Alexa ran a nice long pilot throughout November in order to show potential funders that the service was indeed needed by early career researchers - and needed it was indeed, traffic numbers soared to over 7, 000 visitors within weeks.
Thanks to those of you who used Research is Cool back then - we couldn't have kept going without your help. On the basis of our amazing pilot results, the company started raising funding from a variety of sources including the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust, the Business Gateway and private investment. We also won three business plan competitions over the past few months - most notably 1st Prize in the Scottish Institute for Enterprise competition (beating 300 other applicants across Scotland!) and also competitions organised by the Management School (University of Edinburgh) and The Abbey Santander Group.
Research is Cool today
Recent developments (especially raising all that cash!) made it possible to recruit a team of four amazing people who are currently working on marketing, sales, design, search engine optimisation and further web development. With their help, we have recently completed the redesign of the original site, have introduced the cool social networking features, and are now in the process of actively promoting the new site to early career researchers across the world.
The site currently offers a range of services, particularly academic research recruitment and research networking.
We advertise research assistant jobs, postdoctoral fellowships, postgraduate courses and postgraduate studentships to early career researchers worldwide. You can search for vacancies by subject and/or by location using our job & course search database. You can also find articles with information on sources of funding and advice on how to apply for research job and postgraduate courses on our job advice pages.
Our R-Net search database allows you to search for researchers with similar research interests from different disciplines and countries using relevant keywords. Once you find them, you are able to communicate with them through exchanging emails, building research contacts and/or forming research groups.
Future goals
Our goal is to become the global one-stop-shop for all things research. We have just relocated to the lovely facilities offered by the University of Edinburgh to tekkie start-up companies within the Informatics incubator space and are now benefiting from the cutting-edge research carried out in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
We intend to use the academic expertise available to us to develop much more sophisticated search engines, indexing systems and database maintenance logarithms, so that we constantly stay ahead of the competition and become every researchers' favourite site, regardless of their discipline or geographical location.
