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I've often thought about how difficult it is to find people with the information and insight you need in universities / cities. I'm not even talking about peopl

I've often thought about how difficult it is to find people with the information and insight you need in universities / cities. I'm not even talking about people who can provide profound insight, which is more complicated, merely someone with domain expertise. Generally speaking, I rarely know what most people in my lab are working on, let alone what people in other labs on the same floor have expertise in. This service may already exist, but it would be interesting if there was a utility which allowed you to enter you research interests and expertise / have your published papers be parsed and have that information extracted from them; prompt you to enter what skill sets you had questions about or problems you were looking to solve; and have you matched with someone looking for complementary skills.

a_bonobo 11y ago
This is why I enjoy going to random talks advertised by your department/other departments - you are exposed to ideas outside of your specialization, you have a chance to meet other researchers etc. Sadly most universities (in my experience) don't have a central newsletter for these, usually only for generic talks that are more designed around a "science is interesting!" theme for the public layman. Some people at the the University of Queensland used to run the COMBIO seminars, small seminars with sponsored pizza & beers afterwards. Two scientists would present anything related to computational biology, didn't matter what exactly, or what their specialization was. These were a great starting point for networking. If you're working at a university and would like to see something similar I strongly suggest you set it up yourself, it's a lot of unpaid work but "if you build it, they will come".