Research statements     Back to my home page

Recently, one of my former students asked me for advice about writing a Research Statement for a job application. Here are some thoughts.

The thing is to think "what are they wanting to see?". I can think of a few things...:

  1. They may want to see how well you can communicate the key ideas and contributions of your own research. They might be looking for whether you can excite students about questions that you consider important.
  2. Maybe they want to be convinced that you have done some important or innovative or difficult research. Probably if you can write in such a way that conveys the difficulty and also the novelty, while making it readable, that's a winner.
  3. They probably want to see that you have a vision for research that you personally want to do. A hunger or passion to solve some problems that you think are important or interesting is probably something good to convey. They may feel that that passion for finding out things is an intrinsic property that can add energy to their team and be transferrable to their own research problems.
  4. Finally they may want to see connections with expertise in their own group, or alignment with problems they are familiar with. Important not to force this - it might feel artificial. But dropping in a reference to how your research passions may relate to their project is probably a good thing.

What's the best way to structure it? Maybe something like:

  1. Statement of identity: who are you as a researcher and what defines you as a package. Someone who loves solving problems with mathematics and is excited by the wealth of opportunities to apply the mathematical expertise you've developed to problems in other areas? That sort of thing.
  2. Summary of your key contributions to date, at a high level, but with a bit of specificity to show off a little technical skill.
  3. What your contributions might be in the future, sort of "what would I like to be known for" or a question we have asked in interviews "Imagine you're getting the Fields medal in 10 years time - what will it be for?"