Academic Researcher CV example

What recruiters expect

Before writing anything, it helps to know what the person reading is checking for. In this field that is usually a short, specific list:

• A complete publication list in a consistent style, with author order unaltered.
• Funding held or contributed to, with the amount, the funder and your role on the application.
• Evidence of research independence: first or last author papers, invited talks, collaborations you initiated.
• Teaching and supervision, including the level and the number of students.
• Academic service: peer review, committee membership, conference organisation.
• Named referees, which are conventional rather than optional in academia.

Recommended CV structure

This is the running order the example uses. It is a starting point rather than a rule, but the order reflects what tends to be read first in this profession.

1. Research Profile — Three or four lines positioning you for the role.
2. Education — Degrees, diplomas and school-leaving qualifications.
3. Academic Appointments — Paid roles, in reverse chronological order.
4. Publications — Papers, articles and posters, in your citation style.
5. Research Projects & Funding — Research projects, studies and audits.
6. Conference Presentations — Talks given and conferences attended.
7. Teaching & Supervision — Lecturing, demonstrating and supervision.
8. Awards & Fellowships — Prizes, scholarships and distinctions.
9. Research Skills — Grouped skills, for example "Languages" and "Tooling".
10. Professional Memberships & Service — Bodies you belong to, with membership numbers where relevant.
11. Languages — Spoken languages with CEFR levels.
12. References — Referees, or a line saying they are available on request.

Sections worth adding

• Software & Data Outputs — Increasingly expected in computational fields; cite repositories and datasets as research outputs.
• Public Engagement — Relevant for funders and institutions that assess impact and outreach.

Skills worth including

Grouped rather than listed in one block. Grouping makes a long list readable and shows that you can tell the difference between the things you use daily and the things you have touched.

Beyond the technical list: Supervising doctoral students, Managing collaborations across institutions, Writing to a funding deadline, Responding constructively to reviewer comments. These belong inside your experience bullets, demonstrated, rather than in a list of adjectives.

Example professional summary

Three or four lines, positioned for the role rather than describing your personality. Two versions you can adapt:

Postdoctoral research associate in environmental data science with 11 peer-reviewed publications, 5 as first author, and co-investigator experience on a £480,000 council-funded project. Research focuses on quantifying uncertainty in satellite-derived land surface estimates. Co-supervised two doctoral students to completion and convene a master’s module of 60 students.

Early-career researcher with a completed PhD and two years of postdoctoral experience, building an independent line of work on spatial uncertainty. Six first-author publications, one fellowship application under review, and regular peer review for three journals in the field.

Writing your experience

The difference between a CV that gets a call and one that does not is almost always in the bullet points. Each pair below shows a real rewrite of the kind of line that appears on most CVs in this field.

Taken from the example

The sample CV for this profession is fully written. A few sections from it, so you can see the level of specificity that works:

Experience

Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences

• Lead the uncertainty quantification workstream of a multi-institution project on land use change detection, working with two partner universities and a national agency.
• Developed an open Bayesian hierarchical framework for propagating sensor uncertainty into classification outputs, released as an R package with documentation and test data.
• Initiated a collaboration with a hydrology group at a partner institution that has produced two co-authored papers outside the original project scope.
• Contributed the methods section and data management plan to a successful £480,000 council grant application, and am named co-investigator.

Audit and research

• Uncertainty-aware land use change detection (council-funded) — £480,000 over three years, funded by a national research council; three partner institutions.
• Practitioner decision support pilot (internal seed funding) — £18,000 internal seed award to test how land managers interpret probabilistic maps.

Education

• PhD Environmental Science, University of East Anglia
• MSc Applied Statistics (Distinction), University of Sheffield — Distinction
• BSc (Hons) Geography, University of Delhi — First Class

Common mistakes

ATS considerations

Applicant tracking systems behave differently by sector, and generic advice is often wrong for a given field. These points are specific to academic researcher applications:

• Academic recruitment is usually reviewed by panels rather than parsers, but many institutions still route applications through a system. Keep the CV single column and avoid text boxes.
• Include your ORCID identifier - it is the most reliable way for a panel to verify your publication record.
• Spell out funder names in full alongside abbreviations on first use.
• Use a single, consistent citation style throughout. Inconsistency reads as carelessness to an academic reader.

The Minimal ATS layout is built for this, and the ATS guide covers what parsers do to a file in more detail.

Guides that go deeper

This page applies general CV advice to one field. The full treatment of each part is here:

• How Long Should a CV Be? — Two pages for most people, and a clear method for getting there when you have more experience than space.
• How to Describe Work Experience — The difference between listing duties and demonstrating impact, and a repeatable way to rewrite any weak bullet point.
• How to Write a Professional Summary — Four lines at the top of the page that decide whether the rest gets read. A method, and the three ways they usually go wrong.

Questions about academic researcher CVs