Find your next research position without the spreadsheet.
A personalized list of open RA, postbac, and postdoc positions that actually fit your CV and goals. Built and curated by a Harvard-trained neuroscientist who's helped 30+ mentees land grad school placements with a 90%+ success rate.
You can't find what isn't searchable.
Most open academic positions live on portals that aren't indexed by Google, scattered across 100+ different institutional career sites, hospital systems, federally-funded research institutes, and field-specific job boards. Each portal does its own thing. None of them know your CV.
So you do what most applicants do: you cold-email PIs whose papers you've read, hoping one is hiring. Sometimes it works. Mostly the email sits unread.
This tool does the systematic search you'd do if you had three weekends free. Then I (or my AI) read each posting against your CV and goals, and tell you which 15-25 are actually worth your time.
Inside your match report
A branded PDF (about 15-25 pages) plus a sortable Google Sheet, containing:
- 15-25 ranked positions matched to your CV, research goals, and constraints (visa status, geography, career stage)
- A fit score and rationale for each pick. Not just "this is a research assistant role at MIT," but actual reasoning about why this lab might want you and why you might want them.
- Green flags and red flags for every posting. The "just looking for someone to maintain the mouse colony" that will make it hard to have your own project. The "co-authorship on several manuscripts expected" bright green flag. Do they want someone for one year? two? more? How does that match with your goals? Is the position full-time, or part-time? Which is better for you?
- Application deadlines when explicitly listed. Especially critical for postbac fellowships with annual cycles.
- PI and lab names wherever extractable. So you can write the cold email that actually gets noticed.
- A strategy section with notes specific to your profile.
How it works
Upload your CV and fill the intake form.
About 5 minutes. The questions that actually shape your match: career stage, research focus, geographic preferences, work eligibility, and what you want to learn next.
The system scrapes and scores.
Behind the scenes, the tool pulls ~6,000 academic positions from 90 sources, filters them against your profile, and uses Claude AI to rank the survivors.
You get a curated report.
Tier 1 (AI-curated) lands within 24-48 hours. Tier 2, I personally review the picks, prune the noise, and write an editorial intro. 5 business days.
About me
I'm a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and an academic coach with a track record of helping students land where they want to go.
My PhD was at Harvard, where I worked on the developing brain. Before that, I did research at Kent State University, Washington University in St. Louis, the Broad Institute, and Boston Children's Hospital.
Outside the lab, I've mentored 30+ undergraduates and recent BSc graduates through their grad school applications. Last year's cohort had 90+% placement, including at programs like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UCSF.
This tool is what I built for myself when I started mentoring more people looking for RA positions, and they're ALL frustrated by how opaque the lack of a centralized job posting site makes the process, and sick of cold emailing tens of PIs with no response! It's so much easier to start if you know who's hiring for sure. I'm offering it because the same problem you're trying to solve is the one I've spent five years solving for individual mentees.
Two ways to use this
Self-Serve
- AI-curated report
- 15-25 ranked positions
- Fit scores, rationales, green/red flags
- Application deadlines
- Same engine, no human editorial pass
Curated by Ya'el
- Everything in Self-Serve, plus:
- I personally review every pick
- I prune false positives and surface labs the scraper missed
- Custom editorial intro on your top 3-5 plays
- Visa and eligibility nuance the AI sometimes misses
Add-ons (optional)
Frequently asked questions
Who is this for?
Final-year undergraduates and recent BSc graduates applying to postbac or RA positions. Master's students applying to RA roles. PhD students nearing graduation, post-graduation, or current postdocs applying to postdocs.
Do you cover positions outside the US?
Currently, the tool is US-only. Coverage spans US R1 universities, top medical centers, federally-funded research institutes, and major postbac programs.
What about visa sponsorship?
The intake asks for your visa or eligibility status, and the report flags positions where sponsorship is explicitly available or unavailable. (Sometimes posting language is ambiguous, in which case it gets a "verify directly" flag.) International applicants are very welcome, many of my mentees are.
How do I get my CV to you?
The intake form asks for a shareable cloud link (Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, set to "anyone with link can view"). If you don't use any of those, email it to me directly.
Will my CV and data stay private?
Yes. I use it only to produce your report. CVs are deleted from my storage after delivery plus a 30-day holding window in case you have follow-up questions. The AI processing (via Anthropic's Claude) doesn't train on your data.
What if the report isn't useful?
Full refund within 7 days. No questions asked.
What if my dream lab isn't in the report?
The report covers ~90 institutional sources, but some positions live only on individual PI lab websites and aren't scrapeable. If you have a specific lab you want to target, the cold email is still your best move. I include strategy notes on cold emailing in your report.
How is this different from Nature Careers or ScienceCareers?
Those are unfiltered job boards. Useful, but you still do all the matching work yourself. This is the matching layer plus my editorial judgment, done for you.
How is this different from ChatGPT?
ChatGPT can't see current job postings (its training data is months old). This tool pulls live postings from ~90 academic sources, then uses AI to score them against your CV. ChatGPT also doesn't know which programs actually flex on visa requirements, or which "postdoctoral fellow" titles are actually faculty positions in disguise. That's the editorial layer.
Apply with intent. Not with a spray gun.
Most academic applications fail because they're sent everywhere instead of somewhere. The applicants who succeed apply to 8-12 carefully chosen positions, each with a tailored SOP and a thoughtful cold email to the PI.
This report exists to make "carefully chosen" actually feasible, without you spending three weekends on it.