Introducing GradNova: A Better Way to Find Your Graduate School Advisor

The Problem Every Prospective Grad Student Knows

If you've ever tried to find a PhD or Master's advisor, you know the drill. You spend hours scrolling through department websites, clicking into faculty pages that haven't been updated since 2019, trying to figure out who's actually recruiting students. You dig through Google Scholar profiles, cross-reference publication dates, and hope that the professor you're interested in is still working on what their outdated bio says.

It's a frustrating, opaque process — and it affects one of the most important decisions of your academic career.

Why It's Broken

The graduate school matching process is broken on both sides:

• Students can't easily find faculty whose research aligns with their interests, who are actively recruiting, and who have funding available.
• Faculty receive hundreds of generic, copy-pasted emails every application cycle from students who haven't done basic research about their work. Sifting through this noise to find genuinely interested, qualified candidates is exhausting — so many great matches slip through the cracks.

The information exists on both sides, but it's scattered across dozens of university websites, academic databases, and email inboxes. No single place brings it all together in a way that's useful for either party.

What GradNova Does

GradNova is a free platform that connects prospective graduate students with faculty who are looking for students like them.

For students, GradNova lets you:

• Search thousands of faculty profiles across universities, filterable by research area, recruiting status, and funding availability
• See real metrics like h-index, citation count, and recent publications — so you know how active a researcher is
• Express interest directly, so faculty know you're serious about working with them
• Track your search with bookmarks, notes, and organized interest lists

For faculty, GradNova lets you:

• Claim your profile and update your recruiting status, funding information, and research interests
• Receive only curated, high-quality matches — GradNova uses intelligent matching to surface students whose research interests, academic background, and qualifications align with what you're looking for. No more parsing hundreds of vague emails to figure out if a student is a real fit
• Replace your inbox with a dashboard — instead of fielding generic cold emails every cycle, see a curated pipeline of students who match your research area, ranked by relevance. GradNova becomes your single source of truth for prospective students — one place to go instead of a scattered inbox
• Trust the signal — every student profile on GradNova includes their research interests, academic history, test scores, and goals. But it's not just about having profiles. GradNova's matching filters these profiles intelligently, so what reaches you has already been vetted for relevance. The students you see are serious, qualified, and specifically interested in your work

Built on Real Data

Every faculty profile on GradNova is built from publicly available academic data — department websites, Google Scholar, ORCID, and grant databases. We aggregate and structure this information so students don't have to spend hours doing it manually.

We currently cover thousands of faculty across computer science departments at universities in the US and Canada, with more departments and disciplines coming soon.

What's Next

We're just getting started. Here's what's on our roadmap:

• More disciplines — expanding beyond CS to engineering, natural sciences, and social sciences
• Smarter matching — helping students discover faculty they wouldn't have found on their own
• Application insights — data-driven tools to help students make better decisions about where to apply
• A newsletter with recruiting updates, faculty spotlights, and application tips

Try It Out

GradNova is free and open to everyone. Whether you're a student starting your graduate school search or a faculty member looking for great candidates, we'd love to have you.

• Students: Start searching for faculty and create your profile to express interest
• Faculty: Claim your profile and let students know you're recruiting

Have questions or feedback? Reach out at hello@gradnova.com.