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  Find the professor you want to match with!

Inspiration

As undergrads ourselves, we realized how hard it is to find and connect with professors doing research — especially when you're new to college or switching majors. ResearchMatch was born out of that frustration. We wanted to create a tool that makes it easy for students to discover meaningful research opportunities based on their academic interests, without the awkward cold emails or hallway hunting.

What it does

ResearchMatch is a student-friendly web platform that matches undergraduates with professors at their university who are actively conducting research. Students can:

Search for professors by keywords (like “AI” or “Bioengineering”)

View clean, modern profiles with name, title, tags, and direct links

Explore research areas across departments in a way that's visually intuitive

How we built it

We used:

HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the frontend

A clean, Figma-inspired UI with responsive design

Python + BeautifulSoup to scrape professor profiles from the university website and build a dynamic professors.json dataset

JavaScript dynamically renders the data on the front end with real-time filtering/search

Challenges we ran into

Scraping from multiple pages while avoiding duplicated or broken links

Matching the design we had in mind with actual working code — making it responsive and readable took iteration

Ensuring images, titles, and departments were all extracted cleanly without manual editing

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a fully functional, search-based research directory from scratch

It looks polished and modern (not like an old-school directory page)

We made the user experience smooth for students — no logins, no clutter

All the data is real and automatically pulled from our university’s site

What we learned

How to scrape and clean real-world messy data

DOM manipulation and dynamic UI rendering with JavaScript

How impactful UI/UX is — it makes or breaks the experience

Collaboration, debugging, and iterating under pressure (and sleep deprivation)

What's next for ResearchMatch

Adding filters by department and year of study

Professor login to post research positions directly

Letting students "apply" or show interest with one click

Building an internal messaging system or email connect

Expanding the scraper to other universities — turning this into a scalable tool!

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• python