A trio of undergraduate students aims to simplify the process of finding research opportunities through the creation of a new site: Nexus.
The beta version of Nexus plans to launch on Sunday, Dec. 1, hoping to centralize the search for undergraduate research opportunities. The website plans to directly connect students with faculty based on their skills, majors and research interests.
The complete version is still in development, with a planned launch in spring 2025.
Russell Erfan, an Undergraduate Student Government (USG) at-large senator and a sophomore majoring in sociology, is the president of Nexus. This past summer, Erfan realized the difficulty that many undergraduate students have in finding research opportunities on campus, given how outdated many of the departments’ websites are and how scattered information was across different sites.
“Professors often have a lot on their plates, and they don’t have the facilities to respond to lots of students at a time,” Erfan said. “Students feel really intimidated by all these walls like existing publications. It was just an idea to kind of get this all together.”
While Erfan’s idea for Nexus originated over the summer, it wasn’t until the beginning of the semester that the project started to come to fruition.
Needing help, Erfan went to Sarah Elbaroudy, a junior majoring in political science and sociology. As the Vice President of Student Affairs for USG, Elbaroudy is charged with advocating and creating services that benefit the student body. As a result, Erfan wanted to gauge her interest in his idea for Nexus as a service for Stony Brook students.
She connected Erfan with Vice President for Research Kevin Gardner and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences David Wrobel.
“[Gardner] would know exactly how faculty would feel about this sort of initiative in terms of having their research broadcasted out there to apply for their research opportunities, as well as direct him [Erfan] in the right direction for anyone else within research who could help,” Elbaroudy said.
Elbaroudy saw potential in Nexus to ease undergraduate students into the research process, creating access to faculty members’ work that many students wouldn’t have otherwise.
“I feel that Stony Brook students come in and they feel it’s a very intimidating thing to achieve,” Elbaroudy said. “They don’t know if cold emails are the right thing to do or they don’t have the right mentorship to know what template to send.”
From there on, Erfan went to advertise Nexus across campus through flyers and social media posts, as well as asking departments if they could advertise Nexus in their monthly emails to attract student developers to the project at the beginning of the semester.
That’s how two computer science majors, junior Brian Lin and freshman Madhav Rapelli, completed the puzzle as they stumbled upon advertisements for Nexus while searching for research opportunities.
Lin is the lead backend developer and Rapelli is the lead frontend developer. Lin works on the technical aspects of the site, such as coding and creating the language the site will use to function.
“I realized how difficult research was to find here, despite our school being known as a research school,” Lin said. “Regarding the technical aspects, since the codes and databases had a lot of the languages that I was very passionate in like Node and Sequel I wanted to join in and learn more from them.”
Rapelli works on the public-facing elements of the site, such as the interface and features that users will interact with.
“I’m the frontend engineer which means I take care of all the operations on the screen that users interact with, that could be making things look pretty or having things more accessible like drop-down buttons,” Rapelli said. “Users can sort and then get the data they want from our website.”
The homepage of Nexus will feature cards of professors’ names, departments and research fields along with a drop-down system that allows students to sort through departments to find the right professors to work with. Users can bookmark certain professors that they are interested in working with and it will save on their browsers so they can come back to it later.
“What Nexus does is have cards that are modeled off Pinterest,” Erfan said. “We took these professors, we took their pictures, we put different fonts and we made it very tabular. You can see a brief glimpse at their descriptions, interests … so if that little [aesthetic] detail is going to help the students get into a lab, why not include it?”
Nexus developers plan to implement a description of professors’ fields of study using artificial intelligence (AI).
“It takes the complicated jargon and filters it down into a very digestible explanation for undergraduates,” Efran said. “That takes API [Application Programming Interface] resources and that costs a little money for every professor description that we kind of simplify. They are negligible. It probably cost around 25 dollars [each].”
Much like any startup, funding was not easy to come across. Erfan had to take money out of his own pocket to fund the site.
Erfan wanted to self-fund this site because he didn’t want to take money from the Student Activity Fee that could have gone to other clubs. However, Erfan is not opposed to using undergraduate funding resources as the site progresses over time.
“We didn’t really want to take away from the student activity fee, since that goes to a lot of clubs,” Efran said. “Maybe seeing as we go forward and then become more of an actual resource on campus, we’ll try to engage with those resources a little more.”
Despite collaboration between Nexus and the Office of the Vice President of Research, the development of the site had its difficulties.
“The biggest concerns that the website has faced [is] data scraping,” Elbaroudy said. “For example, you click on a professor within the physics department and it will lead you to a broken link that doesn’t show their research even though the website says it’ll lead to that.”
The Nexus team has to manually find and embed information regarding a professor’s field of expertise into the website for every department. The process of manually entering every professor can take hours to complete.
While the beta site is set to launch on Dec. 1, the team plans on polishing and working on the site after its kickoff to make it the premier destination for undergraduate students trying to find research experiences.
“The hard part is just figuring out what to add next or where to go next,” Rapelli said. “The ideation part is the key to any website.”
Erfan plans to incorporate professors from the humanities departments to help students studying English and writing find research opportunities, as the current site solely features professors within the science, technology, engineering and math fields.
The team plans on designing the site to be more interactive for users by incorporating more AI features.
“Regarding the future of Nexus, we will definitely be hopefully implementing an AI chatbot where if someone were interested in these certain topics, they can ask the AI and the AI would have all the knowledge,” Lin said. “We would train the model on all the professors here and the AI would spit back a couple [of] professors that perfectly match their interests.”
Erfan, Lin and Rapelli hope to widen their trio in the future, with Lin and Rapelli possibly leading teams of their own and expanding the site’s accessibility for other schools. For now, they plan on creating the site to make students’ academic lives easier.
“We are here for the students,” Erfan said. “[Nexus] is going to be an application that they can use and they should feel free in using. There’s never going to be any paywalls or any sketchy things happening. It’s just going to be there for students to have resources and hopefully it makes their lives easier.”
