News — When Ansh Bhammar and Yash Jain started their freshman year at the Johns Hopkins University, it took months of searching and over a hundred emails to land a research position. Now, with their founding of ForagerOne and its adoption at higher-education institutions, students at partnered universities and colleges can explore relevant research and connect with faculty mentors, while faculty can find promising candidates for their research.
ForagerOne is a web platform that helps colleges and universities build a centralized marketplace for their students and faculty to connect for research and creative activity. It also empowers academic officials, who can access actionable analytics and data to understand their research ecosystems and measure their office’s impact. The platform has recently garnered the attention of academic institutions across all levels - from leading R1 institutions like Johns Hopkins to primarily undergraduate institutions like High Point University. In a short span of six months since ForagerOne concluded its pilot program, five universities have signed up to bring ForagerOne to their institutions and over a dozen more are preparing to adopt their technology next year.
“This tool empowers members of our community and increases the efficacy of happenstance connections, essential for creating rich learning experiences for our students and successful, lasting student-faculty relationships,” stated Thomas Black, University Registrar and Assistant Vice Provost at Johns Hopkins.
ForagerOne’s unique approach focuses on connecting students and faculty at colleges and universities based on shared interests, preserving the organic element that defines the mentor-mentee relationship core to student-faculty interactions. Other solutions, designed to be ‘job-posting sites for research,’ capture just a small subset of faculty willing to involve students and considerably limit the potential mentors for students. Bhammar and Jain successfully validated their strategy during a pilot program with their platform at Johns Hopkins, during which over half of faculty were keen to involve and mentor students, but less than a fifth had specific projects to post.
Many institutions championing this growing trend in higher education, such as High Point University, recognize that undergraduate research provides an important medium for students to gain pre-professional skills that lead to career readiness. “High Point University strives to connect students with faculty mentors in their first year at college,” stated Joanne Altman, Director of Undergraduate Research and Creative Works at High Point. “The earlier students begin undergraduate research, the more they can accomplish in their undergraduate careers. ForagerOne gives us a platform to forge these connections between students and mentors outside of the classroom, while easing our process of tracking collaborations occurring across the university.” She adds, “ForagerOne also helps us showcase our culture of research to prospective students.”
With the considerable amount of interest from universities and colleges nationwide, Bhammar and Jain are now rapidly scaling ForagerOne to institutions, helping them boost their research ecosystems and quality of undergraduate education.
ForagerOne is an affiliate member of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR). This press release does not constitute an endorsement of the service by CUR.
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Founded in 1978, the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) is an organization of individual, institutional, and affiliate members from around the world that share a focus on providing high-quality and collaborative undergraduate research, scholarly, and creative activity opportunities for faculty and students. More than 700 institutions and more than 13,000 individuals belong to CUR. CUR believes that faculty members enhance their teaching and contribution to society by remaining active in research and by involving undergraduates in research, and that students engaged in undergraduate research succeed in their studies and professional advancement.
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