ForagerOne

Our story

As students, we thought, “It’s Johns Hopkins, America’s first research university, how difficult could it be to get involved in research?” Countless hours of googling, 109 emails, and a handful of meetings two months later, we learned the hard way – it’s pretty damn hard.

We started talking to others at Hopkins, eventually interviewing hundreds of students, faculty, and administrators at institutions across the nation. Turns out, many of them shared our frustrations; the barrier for students to get involved in research is ubiquitous, and both students and faculty are dissatisfied. Even university officials recognize these issues and are willing to pay for a technological solution. We were sure that somebody ought to have come up with a good solution - something we could bring to Hopkins. We were wrong. So, we decided that we were going to do it ourselves; there was no point in sitting around and waiting.

After engaging in customer discovery, we realized the true potential and viability of a commercial web-platform to solve these issues. And so, we began to translate our learnings into designing a product, eventually partnering with two fellow students to lead the development of the platform.

Fast forward to the present – we’ve launched our “minimally viable product” at Hopkins this past September and gained over one thousand users, acquired our first contract and sponsorship, secured pre-seed funding, and have interest from additional early adopters to license the platform.

The problem we're solving

Research has become a critical component of higher education. Yet, since research institutions are decentralized, there is a systematic disconnect between students, faculty, and administrators at and across these institutions.

Both students and faculty have expressed clear dissatisfaction with the current system of involving students in faculty research (80% of interviewed students, 71% of interviewed faculty). Students scour through numerous outdated and unstandardized department websites to find faculty, and then cold email to try and get involved. Faculty have no effective means to find and recruit students or other faculty collaborators, especially outside their immediate circles. These issues not only lead to unnecessary inefficiencies but also hinder the formation of collaborative and productive relationships. Institutional officials have no centralized system to track research activity and educational outcomes, limiting their ability to monitor and systematically address weaknesses in their institutions.

Our product

ForagerOne’s web-based platform centralizes and boosts academic research and education by connecting students with faculty researchers, while providing actionable analytics to administrators for improving their institutions. Through our automatically-generated database of faculty members and their research at any given institution, students can easily find the faculty that interest them most and apply to work with them through ForagerOne. Faculty simply have to claim their pre-populated profiles to begin involving students and finding faculty collaborators. By analyzing the activity and outcomes of users, we provide university officials, our paying customer, with key usage metrics and feedback that help them identify strengths and weaknesses in their research ecosystems and students’ educational outcomes.