![The template open in Strokes: the title “Research statement: [Your name]”, then a details table for Position, Limit, Field convention and Resources there and the heading “Opening”.](/_next/image?url=%2F_next%2Fstatic%2Fmedia%2Fhero-light.9b19b9fc.webp&w=3840&q=75)
![The template open in Strokes: the title “Research statement: [Your name]”, then a details table for Position, Limit, Field convention and Resources there and the heading “Opening”.](/_next/image?url=%2F_next%2Fstatic%2Fmedia%2Fhero-dark.ad95f383.webp&w=3840&q=75)
When to use it
- A faculty job application that asks for a research statement or research plan
- A postdoctoral fellowship that asks for a statement of research interests
- A teaching-focused college that wants to know how your research will involve undergraduates
- A third-year, tenure or promotion review that asks for a research narrative
- Turning a dissertation into a research agenda before the job market
A research statement is the part of a faculty or postdoc application that explains what you have found, what you are working on now and what you will do next, and why that work belongs in the department you are applying to. Most run one to three pages. University career guides ask for the same things: one clear theme, results rather than activities, and a future plan that is realistic for the department. The full biology sample below keeps finished results, work in progress and proposed aims apart. In the humanities, check the ad first: this material often goes into the cover letter instead.
How to use this template
Click Use this template and the fill-in version opens in Strokes as a document you can edit and export.
- Name the through-line
Write the question that connects your work in one sentence a colleague in another department could repeat. Cornell's Graduate School advises building the statement around one overarching theme and leaving miscellaneous projects out: committees know you work on more than one statement can hold.
- Write the past and present as findings
For each project: what you asked, what you found, why it mattered. Penn's career services warns against describing research in abstract terms; give your actual results, even incomplete ones, and cite your key papers.
- Plan the future as aims
A few specific aims, split into short- and long-term goals: Penn suggests four or five and a five-year plan, Cornell the next three to five years. The aims should be yours, not your advisor's next grant. The research question examples help you sharpen each one.
- Fit it to the department
Name the equipment, field sites, archives or data you would use there, faculty you could work with, and the students you would involve. Cornell also suggests naming likely funding sources, such as NIH, NSF or foundations. With the job ad and the department's research page attached in a chat, you can ask the Strokes Assistant whether your fit paragraph names resources the department actually has.
- Test it on an outsider
A committee may include people outside your field. Give the draft to one such reader, and ask a colleague in your subfield to check it too. Then cut to the limit in the ad.
Research statement format, section by section
| Section | What it answers | Rough share |
|---|---|---|
| SectionOpening | What it answersYour overarching question and why it matters | Rough shareOne paragraph |
| SectionPast research | What it answersWhat you asked and found, and what it changed | Rough shareAbout a quarter |
| SectionCurrent research | What it answersWhat you are doing now, how it builds on the past, early results | Rough shareAbout a quarter |
| SectionFuture research | What it answersA few aims, short and long term, over about five years | Rough shareA third or more |
| SectionFunding | What it answersWho could fund the next stage, and what you have won | Rough shareA few sentences |
| SectionFit | What it answersResources you would use, people you could work with, students you would involve | Rough shareOne paragraph |
| SectionClosing | What it answersWhere the work leads, in two or three sentences | Rough shareShort |
On length, Cornell's Graduate School says one or two pages, three at most, and Penn's career services says typically two to three, noting that figures can change that. Penn adds that separate research statements are usually requested in engineering and the social, physical and life sciences, while in the humanities the same material often goes into the cover letter. Cornell also suggests a longer version, 5 to 15 pages, to bring to interviews, and advises checking with your advisor whether you need one.
Research statement sample: urban ecology
A complete statement for an invented postdoc applying to a biology department at a research university. About 500 words, roughly a page single-spaced.
Two community gardens six blocks apart can have the same flowers in bloom and very different afternoons. In my dissertation fieldwork, the garden that ran 3°C hotter had a third fewer bumblebee visits after 1 p.m. My research asks how heat in cities changes pollination, and what cities can plant, shade or build to keep it working. I combine sensor networks, behavioral experiments and models that a parks department can use.
Past research: heat sets the schedule. For my PhD I built a network of 120 temperature loggers across 40 community gardens in two cities and paired it with three summers of pollinator counts. Afternoon visits fell as garden temperature rose, even with the same flowers in bloom, and the drop was steepest for the largest bees. That paper appeared in 2024, and a second is under review. The finding moved my question from which bees live in cities to when they can afford to fly.
Current research: does shade help? As a postdoc, I am testing whether shade restores afternoon foraging. Over two summers, twelve gardeners and I covered half of each plot with shade cloth for six weeks. In the shaded halves, afternoon visits recovered to about 80 percent of morning levels, against 55 percent in the open halves. What I don't know yet is whether shaded flowers set as much seed, because a bee that visits without pollinating doesn't help a garden; those counts will be finished this winter.
Future research. Over the next five years, my lab will build on those two results to give cities guidance they can act on.
- Aim 1, years 1–2: map heat risk for pollination. Combine the logger data from my PhD with satellite surface temperatures to predict, block by block, where afternoon pollination is most at risk.
- Aim 2, years 2–4: test fixes at scale. If the seed counts confirm the shade result, scale it up: with a city parks department, compare shade trees, pergolas and late-blooming plantings across 30 gardens, measuring both visits and seed set.
- Aim 3, years 4–5 and beyond: model the long term. Use the maps from Aim 1 and the field results from Aim 2 to build a model that projects pollination under hotter summers, which planners can run for their own neighborhoods.
Funding. Aim 1 is ready for a federal early-career proposal in my first year. Aims 2 and 3 suit foundation and municipal partners. My postdoctoral fellowship has given me experience running a budget and a field crew of six.
Why Ashcombe. The university's field station and the geography department's remote-sensing lab would give Aim 1 its maps, and Professor Lena Hart's work on urban soils makes her a natural partner on Aim 2. Undergraduates ran half of my field counts; each summer I would build fieldwork around a team of four, with projects small enough to finish in ten weeks.
In ten years, I want a city to be able to ask where its pollinators will struggle next summer, and get the answer from data my lab collected.
What makes it work: the theme fits in one sentence a botanist and a city planner would both understand. The statement keeps three kinds of work apart. The dissertation finding is published, the shade result is in hand while its seed counts are still coming in, and the aims are proposed. Each aim names the result it builds on, and Aim 2 says what it depends on. The aims have years attached, run from short to long term, and go beyond the dissertation, which shows independence. The fit paragraph names a facility, a colleague and the students who would do the work.
Research statement examples by field
The past–present–future order holds everywhere. What changes is the unit of work: experiments and grants in the lab sciences, datasets and articles in the social sciences, books in most of the humanities.
My second project asks why some city councils hear public comment before a vote and others after, and whether the order changes what passes. I have collected minutes from 212 councils in four states, 2010–2024, and will code every vote for when comment occurred. In years 1 and 2 I will release the dataset with a first article; in years 3 to 5, a book manuscript comparing councils that changed their rules with those that didn't. Students in my methods course will learn content analysis on the real records.
It describes the data in numbers, gives each output a year and turns the project into teaching material for the department's own courses.
My book manuscript, The Night Board, follows the women who staffed telephone exchanges overnight in three Midwestern cities from 1890 to 1925. Using company personnel files, city directories and court records, it argues that night operators became their cities' informal emergency dispatchers long before anyone gave them the title. I will deliver the manuscript to the press in 2027. My second project follows the same exchanges into the age of automatic dialing, asking what the cities lost when the night board went quiet.
In the humanities this material often lives in the cover letter, so keep to the essentials: the book's argument and sources, a delivery date and a second project, so the committee sees a career rather than one book.
Samples for teaching colleges and postdocs
The same research reads differently to different readers. A search committee at a college without graduate students and a panel choosing a postdoctoral fellow ask different questions, so each sample below is written for one of them.
For a search committee at a teaching-focused college. The readers are future colleagues in a small department. They want to know whether the research can run on undergraduates, in a summer or a thesis year, with equipment the department already has. Penn's career services gives the plainest warning: don't talk about working with graduate students if the institution has only undergraduates.
My research is built to run on undergraduates. Each project in my lab, which tests low-cost sensors for lead in household tap water, fits a ten-week summer or a two-semester thesis and needs only a UV-vis spectrometer and a fume hood, both already in Hollins Hall. Over three years, eight undergraduates have worked on the project; three are co-authors on a paper now under review, and two went on to graduate programs. At Marlow College, I would recruit two students a year from General Chemistry and apply for undergraduate-research funding in my second year.
It answers the practical questions: what the research costs, whether it fits existing equipment and what students get from it.
For a fellowship panel and a future mentor. The readers are the scientist whose lab you would join and the panel that awards the fellowship. They want to know what you will learn there, what you bring that the lab lacks, and what you will take to a lab of your own.
My doctoral work measured how drought changes root growth in maize; what it couldn't tell me is which genes switch on first. Dr. Okafor's lab has the single-cell sequencing pipeline to answer that, and I bring three seasons of field data and a root imaging method her group does not yet use. In two years I aim to publish the first single-cell map of drought response in maize roots and to write the independent grant proposal that will carry the question into my own lab.
It answers all three in three sentences, and the last one names the independent grant proposal, which shows the panel a path to independence.
Weak and strong research statements
Among the problems that weaken statements, Cornell's guide lists proposals that are too ambitious and a lack of clear direction. Penn adds future plans that mirror your advisor's work, a mismatch with the institution's resources or students, and jargon outsiders can't follow. Edit for readability: the whole committee has to follow the argument, not only the specialist.
Strong statement
- States what you found and why it matters
- Future aims that are yours and could start in year one
- One theme, with the side projects left out
- Plain enough for the whole committee to follow
- Names this department's resources, people and students
Weak statement
- Lists projects and methods without results
- Future plans that continue your advisor's grant
- Ten projects and no through-line
- Jargon only your subfield reads
- Relies on equipment or students the institution doesn't have
The research statement usually travels with a teaching statement. Let them refer to each other once, for example a course built on your research, and keep the rest separate. If a committee or funder asks for a single project in detail, with methods, a timeline and a budget, you are writing a research proposal instead. For a funder's format and a budget narrative, see the grant proposal example.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a research statement be?
Usually one to three pages. Cornell's Graduate School advises one or two pages, three at most, and Penn's career services says typically two to three, noting that figures can change that. The limit in the job ad comes first. In many humanities fields, the research overview goes into the cover letter instead of a separate statement.
What is the difference between a research statement and a research proposal?
A research statement covers your whole research career for a job application: what you have found, what you are doing and what you will do over the next five years, and why it fits the department. A research proposal describes one project in detail, with its question, methods, timeline and often a budget, for a funder, a degree program or a committee.
Do humanities jobs require a research statement?
Some do, but many don't ask for one separately. Penn's career services notes that in the humanities the research overview is often folded into the cover letter. When a statement is requested, describe the book project, its argument and sources and where it stands with a press, then your articles and a second project.
