Launching today
ProfScout
Find the professors who actually reply to cold emails
1 follower
Find the professors who actually reply to cold emails
1 follower
ProfScout helps undergrads and grad students find professors to cold email for research opportunities, internships, and grad school. It ranks 53,000+ professors by reply-fit (research overlap, active funding, new labs) using OpenAlex, ORCID, NIH and NSF data, with verified emails and an outreach tracker.
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Hey PH, I'm Gladwyn, 18, and I built ProfScout.
Every guide on getting into research says the same thing: write a great cold email. I spent a long time doing exactly that and getting ghosted anyway. The problem was never the email. It was that I was emailing professors who had no funding, a full lab, or hadn't published in years.
So I built the thing I wanted: a search over 53,000+ professors (9.5M papers from OpenAlex and ORCID, cross-checked against NIH RePORTER, NSF, and live faculty pages) that scores each one on how likely they are to reply, not how famous they are. You get a verified email, the one recent paper worth anchoring on, and a tracker for drafts, sends, and replies.
Two things on purpose:
It never writes the email for you. Professors can smell generated emails. You get a fill-in-the-blank structure and write it in your own voice. That's the main difference from Reachly, which drafts the email with AI. ResearchPath and Google Scholar don't write emails either, but they also don't tell you who is likely to reply: ResearchPath lists faculty-posted openings, and Scholar gives you papers, not funding or lab status.
No sponsored results. Professors can't pay to rank higher.
Where it is right now: 2,300+ students signed up, 2,600+ professors unlocked, 4,800+ emails found. $10/month or $30/semester.
Happy to answer anything about how the reply-fit score works or where the data comes from (profscout.com/our-data has the full breakdown, including where it can be wrong)./