How to Contact Professors: Follow the Grant Money First
Asked on the help desk, 2014: “How to contact professors?”
On this page
Some August afternoon, an assistant professor gets the email she has been waiting on for a year: the grant is funded. Three years, a few hundred thousand dollars, and a line in the budget for one graduate research assistant. She now has a hiring problem. The person in that line needs to start next fall, which means she needs to find them before the department’s admissions committee meets in January.
She will not post a job ad. She will talk to colleagues, watch for promising emails, and look closely at files when they arrive. If you write to her in October with a sensible message about her new project, you are not bothering her. You are solving her problem.
That is the idea behind everything Edyssy was built on: follow the money. Find the faculty who were just funded, learn what they promised to do, and contact them before admission season. The rest of this page is how.
Step 1: Find the people with money
NIH RePORTER
For biomedical, health, and behavioral sciences, NIH RePORTER (reporter.nih.gov) is the public database of NIH-funded projects. It lists each award’s principal investigator, institution, abstract, fiscal year, and budget period.
Useful ways to search it:
- By keyword and fiscal year, to find recent projects in your area.
- By institution, to see who at a target university is funded.
- By activity code. R01 is the standard research project grant. R21 is a smaller exploratory award. K awards fund early-career researchers’ own development. F31 is a predoctoral fellowship for a student, not a lab position.
- By application type. The project number’s leading digit tells you whether it is new (type 1), a competing renewal (type 2), or a non-competing continuation (type 5), per the NIH ExPORTER data dictionary. Type 3 marks a supplement. New and renewed awards are your best leads, because the budget for people has just been set.
Look at the project end date too. NIH defines it as the current end of the project including future years already committed, so a type 5 record with three years left can still be a lab that needs a student.
Read the abstract. It says, in plain language, what the lab committed to doing. For a feel of what a full record looks like, the archived NIH award on stem cell models of the reflex arc shows the specific aims, the budget and the project period on one page.
NSF Award Search
For most other sciences, engineering, and parts of the social sciences, NSF Award Search (nsf.gov/awardsearch) does the same job. You can filter by award start date, program, and institution, and every award has a public abstract. Watch especially for CAREER awards. NSF says recipients receive a minimum of $400,000 over a five-year period, and only faculty in at least a 50% tenure-track position at the assistant professor level or equivalent are eligible, so a CAREER award almost always marks a young lab with several years of money ahead of it.
Other funders
The Department of Energy, the Department of Defense research offices, USDA’s NIFA, NASA, and private foundations all fund graduate students. Their databases are less convenient. University news releases (“Professor X receives $1.2 million to study…”) fill some gaps, and our own grant search pulls recent awards together so you can scan them by field.
Step 2: Read before you write
A grant abstract tells you what the lab plans to do. Papers tell you how they actually work. Before contacting anyone, read two or three of their recent papers, published in roughly the last three years. Use Google Scholar sorted by date, or the professor’s ORCID record, which often lists recent work more completely than a lab website that was last updated in 2022. ORCID describes its iD as a unique, persistent identifier, free of charge to researchers, so it stays with the person when they change institutions, which a lab page does not.
Read the abstract, the figures, and above all the discussion. The discussion is where authors say what remains unknown, which is often what the next student will do.
Once your list grows past a dozen professors, keep structured notes on each one, or their work will blur together by the time you write your fifth email. A format that works well is the annotated bibliography: the full citation, a two-sentence summary, a note on the method, the open question the paper leaves, and a line on how your own experience connects to it. If you have never kept notes that way, a guide to how annotated bibliography entries are built shows the summary, evaluation, and relevance layers clearly, and the same structure will feed straight into your emails and your statement of purpose later.
Also check the lab’s people page. A lab with two students about to graduate and a new grant is very likely recruiting. A lab with eight first-years may be full.
Step 3: Choose the right channel
| Channel | When it works | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Almost always the default, September to early November | Generic messages get archived in seconds | |
| Conferences | Poster sessions and talks in your field, any time of year | Keep it to a few minutes, follow up by email within a week |
| Campus visit or lab visit | You are nearby or attending a recruitment event | Always ask ahead, never drop in |
| Current graduate students | To learn about funding, recruiting and advising style | Don’t ask them to forward your CV |
| Department webinars and open houses | Programs that run them in the fall | Ask a real question, not “what do you look for?” |
| LinkedIn or social media | Only after you have met in person | Many faculty rarely check these |
For most applicants, email is the whole game. Keep it short, specific to that professor’s recent work, and end with a question that can be answered in one line. We have separate pages with four tips for emailing professors and with full sample emails to adapt.
Conferences
If you are presenting a poster or attending a regional or national meeting in your field, look up which target faculty will be there. Go to their talk or their students’ posters. Introduce yourself in a sentence, say what you work on, and ask one question about their research. That is all. Within a week, send an email that starts with where you met, so the professor can place you.
Student registration rates at many scientific societies are modest, and some offer travel awards for undergraduates who present. A single meeting can put you in front of several of the people on your list.
Lab visits
If you live near a target university or will be in town anyway, email a week or two ahead and ask for 15 minutes. Prepare two questions about their work and one about how students in the lab are funded. Bring nothing but a short CV in case they ask.
If the meeting goes well, the professor may introduce you to a student or postdoc in the lab. Take that seriously. A twenty-minute conversation with the person who would sit at the next bench often tells you more than the meeting with the professor did, and the professor will usually ask that person afterward what they thought of you. Send a two-line thank-you email the same day, mention one specific thing you discussed, and do not attach anything new unless they asked for it.
Current graduate students
Students are the most honest source of information about a lab. Their emails are usually on the lab page. Ask whether the lab is taking students, how often they meet with the advisor, and whether funding has ever been a problem. Keep it short. They are busy, underpaid, and often generous with their time if you respect it.
LinkedIn, rarely
Plenty of professors have a profile and never look at it. A cold LinkedIn message may sit unread for months. Use it only to stay connected with someone you have already met.
The same goes for academic social platforms. Following a lab’s account is a reasonable way to see what they are excited about this month, and sometimes a lab announces an open position there first. Replying to a professor’s post with your CV is not a reasonable way to apply.
The order that works
Find funded faculty. Read their work and take notes. Write a focused email in early fall. Meet in person if a conference or visit allows. Then apply, and mention in your statement the faculty you hope to work with and why. If you are unsure where that contact step fits among transcripts, tests, and letters, our overview of the steps for applying to grad school lays out the full sequence.
What not to do: don’t phone a professor’s office out of the blue, don’t send the same pitch through email, LinkedIn, and a contact form in the same week, and don’t write to their personal social media accounts. Pick one channel, use it well, and wait. Persistence that feels like pursuit is the fastest way to turn a funded professor with an open slot into one who remembers your name for the wrong reason.
More questions on this
- How do I tell whether a professor has money to fund a new graduate student?
- Look for a recently started grant on NIH RePORTER or NSF Award Search, ideally one that began within the last year or so and runs several more years. New awards usually carry personnel budget. Also check the lab page for senior students who are about to graduate, since their departure frees funding.
- Is it okay to message a professor on LinkedIn instead of email?
- Use email first. Many faculty rarely check LinkedIn, and a message there may sit unseen for months. If you have already met someone at a conference and connected there, a short LinkedIn note is fine, but the real conversation should move to email.
- Can I just show up at a professor's office if I'm visiting the campus?
- No, not unannounced. Email a week or two ahead, say when you will be on campus, and ask whether a 15-minute meeting would be convenient. Many professors are happy to meet a prospective student who asked first.
- Should I contact current graduate students in the lab before writing to the professor?
- It can help, especially to learn whether the lab is recruiting and what the advisor is like. Keep it short and respectful of their time. Do not ask them to pass your CV to their advisor unless they offer.