Advice
Personal academic website or lab website: which do you need?
Should a principal investigator have a personal academic homepage, a lab website, or both? How to decide, and how to avoid maintaining two sites.
Early-career researchers usually start with a personal academic website. Once you lead a group, the question becomes whether to keep it, replace it with a lab website, or run both.
The personal academic website
A personal site is about you: your CV, your publications, your talks and teaching. It follows you through postdocs and job moves, and it is what hiring committees look at.
The lab website
A lab site is about the group: the research programme, the people, openings and news. It is what prospective students and collaborators look for.
When you need both
Most PIs are best served by one site with a strong PI page. The lab site carries the research and team; the PI page carries your biography, positions, awards, CV and full publication list. Two separate sites double the maintenance and split your search ranking.
How to combine them
- Make the PI profile a full page: photo, biography, education, positions, awards, CV download and links to ORCID and Google Scholar.
- Keep one publication list for the lab, with your own papers filterable.
- Use your own domain so the site moves with you.
Labsite includes a dedicated PI page alongside the lab's pages, so one site covers both. Start yours.