in Engineering

Academia.edu helps academics keep up with the latest activity in your research area

Academia.edu helps academics answer the question ‘who’s researching what?’. It applies to any research area: you can type in ‘thermophilic organisms’, or one of 12,420 other research interests, and find out who is working in that area worldwide, as well as what they are working on – the latest papers, conferences, blog posts, status updates etc.

Academia.edu launched just over 12 months ago, and is now one of the largest online communities of researchers in the world; we now have 83,906 profiles, and about 350,000 unique monthly visitors.

We have a small elite team:

Richard Price, CEO, did a Ph.D at Oxford in philosophy, and won the All Souls Prize Fellowship there, which is awarded to two students a year. Richard previously founded www.peopleradar.com, which was the largest application on the Facebook API 1.0 for 8 months, and www.liveout.co.uk, a student rental site in Oxford.

Ben Lund, CTO, did a BA at Cambridge. After that, he became project lead on Connotea, which grew to be one of the two leading academic bookmarking applications on the web (like Delicious, but for academics). Ben has built a search engine for the World Health Organization, and also integrated Google Health into Praxeon, a leading medical search engine.

Jarques Pretorius, Lead front-end designer/developer. Jarques recently graduated from the Art Institute of California – San Francisco, where he won the award for best portfolio. Jarques’s designs can be seen at www.jpretorius.com.

We also have 3 interns currently working with us.

Our motto is “cap production deploy”. We care obsessively about building and deploying high quality software. Some of our priorities in feature development are:

Something people want: the feature should clearly meet a strong need/desire, and be the highest on our list of priorities

Fast development: our goal is to finish and deploy products.

Careful development: we want the feature to be well architected and easily modifiable and extensible

We are based in North Beach, San Francisco, with amazing 8th floor views of the bay. Everyone discusses everything in the company. No topic is left un-discussed. You should hopefully enjoy this kind of atmosphere!