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Office for Faculty Excellence

Faculty Public Profile

What Is a Faculty Profile?

A faculty profile is a living résumé for faculty members as well as a comprehensive look into past and present accomplishments. 

A profile can include basic biographical information, such as education and professional experience, as well as teaching, research, publications, grants, and awards.

Profiles can play an active role in professional development and networking. Public web profiles that demonstrate a faculty member’s history, expertise, and research interests make their work discoverable to other academics and potential collaborators. An effective faculty profile can expand faculty members’ personal networks and, in turn, the scope of their work.

You can find available resources here.

What Makes an Effective Faculty Profile?

An effective faculty profile tells the story of a scholar’s work. It should include basic biographical information and highlight professional experience and degrees, research output, areas of expertise, and accolades. Above all else, an effective faculty profile must be accurate and up to date.

Faculty web profiles may also include:

  • A list of recent publications or an external link to their scholarly works
  • The faculty member’s current teaching schedule
  • Links to the faculty member’s personal website, CV, affiliated research lab, or other relevant activities that showcase their contributions to the field

How Faculty Profiles Contribute to Institutional Success

At the institutional level, faculty profiles are one way to highlight the quality and reputation of faculty, increasing the visibility of the college and university. Institutions with greater visibility are more likely to establish strong partnerships, secure funding, and lead in rankings among peer institutions. Prospective students may also view your faculty profiles when considering which universities they want to apply to. High-quality faculty profiles can play an important role in celebrating their work and accomplishments.

Faculty Profile Management: Best Practices

  • Accurate, up-to-date information: 
    • High-quality faculty profiles draw from data sources that are automatically populated and refreshed rather than relying solely on a one-time manual data entry.
  • Clear showcasing of faculty accolades: 
    • A faculty member’s grants, awards, and accolades should be easy to find on their profile page.
  • Consistency across the institution:
    • Faculty accomplishments reflect the institutional look and feel; consistency across schools and departments reinforces and strengthens your institution’s branding.
  • Reporting and repurposing of data:
    • Faculty profiles contain a wealth of important data relevant to other institutional priorities. This data should be easy to reuse and repurpose for evaluations, reporting, and institutional research.
  • Consider including:
    • Grant Activity
    • Honors & Awards 
    • Publications (ORCiD, Google Sm)
    • Teaching History
    • Service commitments
    • Lab website
    • Associations (affiliated groups)
    • Social Media

Resources

  • Citation Management: Citation managers such as Zotero or Mendeley can be used to create shareable collections of citations. Although not a profiling system, citation managers can be useful if you need to share a large number of citations in one place.
  • Research Impact: This guide from the Libraries website discusses ways to measure, visualize, and maximize your research impact.
  • Citation Index: If you connect your ORCiD ID to the Citation Index it unlocks additional services for you, including the ability to search for NC State collaborators, to embed publication feeds on your faculty profile, and the use of the CV Service through which the Libraries will populate your ORCiD profile on your behalf, saving you time and effort! The Citation Index is a collection of publication information from NC State researchers.
  • ORCiD: ORCiD allows you to create a unique persistent identifier for your research output, and is also a faculty profiling system where you can share your works, funding, appointments, and more. ORCiD is the identifier of choice required by many federal funders and journals, and the data on your ORCiD profile is interoperable with various internal and external systems, reducing the number of times you need to re-enter the same citation information across platforms.
  • Google Scholar
  • Research Gate
  • Lab websites: Your college level communications office may have resources to support building a lab website or personal profile
  • College Faculty Directory Page: Ensure your information is accurate in your college level directory. Work with your college’s communication team to make sure you are following all processes they have in place to make any changes to your directory information.
  • Creating Professional Portfolio
  • Social Media Strategy Hub: Consider ways to engage with social media to enhance your profile and impact, including sites like LinkedIn
  • Web Platform: The NC State Web Platform provides a robust platform for sites of all sizes and types. Whether you are creating a simple site with information-dense pages or are building a high-level marketing site, the NC State Web Platform has the flexibility and blocks to make your site user-friendly (to both the site maintainer and the end user).

FAQs

A faculty profile is a comprehensive representation of a faculty member’s education, professional experience, research and publications, awards and recognitions, and other relevant information. It serves as a professional marketing tool for faculty members, facilitates research collaboration, and helps institutions showcase the achievements of their faculty.

A faculty profile typically includes personal information, education and degrees, professional experience, research and publications, awards and recognitions, and other relevant information.

A faculty profile can help enhance an institution’s reputation and brand, facilitate recruitment and retention of faculty members, and secure funding and grants.

A faculty profile provides opportunities for professional development and recognition, allows for networking and collaboration, and can help secure research and grant opportunities. When profiles are comprehensive and up to date, they can be a significant professional asset for faculty members.

Ensure that information is accurate and up to date, use a consistent formatting style for all faculty, clearly highlight accomplishments, incorporate visuals and images such as a faculty member’s photo, and actively maintain faculty data to include the latest outputs and updates.

Information on this page has been sourced from Interfolio.