About GrantAffinity — how it finds grants, where its information comes from, and what it does with yours.
No. Faculty profiles are created automatically from your department's directory and from your institution's research records, so you are probably already listed. Claiming your profile will allow you to receive personalised grant recommendations.
Create an account, find yourself under Faculty, and use Claim this profile on your profile page. We email a confirmation link to the address on the profile; clicking it verifies the claim. Once verified you can edit your details, curate your publication list, and your weekly recommendations start being computed for you.
Everyone with an account at your institution. GrantAffinity is an internal tool — it is not a public directory, and profiles are not visible to other institutions on the platform. The information on them comes from sources that are already public (your department page, published literature) or already internal (your institution's awards records).
Nothing on your profile is written by hand by us. Each part has a source:
| On your profile | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Name, title, contact details | Your department's directory page |
| Research interests, bio | Your department's directory page |
| Publications | PubMed, OpenAlex, ORCID, and your institution's research system |
| Funded awards | Your institution's research administration records |
| Project interests | You — typed in by you, if you have claimed your profile |
| AI expertise summary | Generated from everything above (see How matching works) |
Two of those — research interests and bio — are scraped from a page your department controls. If yours is thin or out of date, that is usually why a profile reads oddly, and editing your profile here fixes it without waiting for the department page to change.
Account → Edit profile, once your claim is verified. You can change your title, contact details, webpage, research interests and bio, your department affiliations, and your ORCID iD, Scopus Author ID and OpenAlex author id.
Funded awards come from your institution's official records and are not editable here. For anything else that looks wrong and has no edit control, email support@grantaffinity.com.
Yes, in two ways. You can add research interests directly to your profile under Account → Edit profile. You can also add specific project interests, and this is the most powerful way to increase the relevance of your matches. Account → Project interests lets you describe what you are working on or want to work on next, in your own words. Unlike a publication list it can describe work you have not published yet, and it feeds directly into both your grant recommendations and whether you turn up in colleagues' expert searches. Project interests will not appear on your faculty profile.
Usually one of these:
You can also fetch on demand or add anything by hand — see below.
Account → My publications. There you can import from PubMed, OpenAlex, or ORCID on demand rather than waiting for the next scheduled run. You can also add a publication manually (title, journal, year, DOI, abstract) or remove anything that isn't yours. Anything you remove is listed under Removed at the foot of the same page, with a Restore button if you change your mind.
Name-based matching is the likely culprit: a common surname and initial can attach a stranger's work to your profile. Remove it under Account → My publications.
That is deliberate. When a preprint and the journal article it became are both present, we show the published version and hide the preprint, so the same work isn't counted twice. A preprint that is not yet published shows normally.
There is no robust public database of private funding opportunities. We are actively working to expand the number of private funding opportunities in our database during the pilot period, and we hope to have a more complete listing in the coming weeks.
Each listing links to the funder's own announcement, which is always the authority on deadlines and eligibility. Please check it before you rely on anything shown here.
Grants → Suggest an opportunity. Only two things are required — the funder's name and a web address — because a reviewer can work from those; anything else you add just saves them a search. Suggestions go to a curator, who checks the call and adds it so that everyone at your institution benefits, not only you.
We cover a lot of funders but nowhere near all of them, and some funders publish calls in formats nothing can read automatically. Suggesting the missing opportunity will allow the entire community to benefit from a new funding opportunity.
An opportunity is retired once its deadline passes, or once no source has listed it for three weeks. We keep the record rather than deleting it, so a grant you had saved still appears in your list — marked expired — instead of vanishing without explanation.
Save any opportunity and it appears under Account → Saved grants. You can also ignore an opportunity, which keeps it out of your recommendations.
It runs in two stages:
First, retrieval. Your profile — interests, bio, recent publications, funded awards — is condensed into a mathematical representation of your research, and the same is done for every opportunity. Comparing those is fast enough to rank thousands of grants at once, and it matches on meaning rather than wording, so a call about "neoplasia" can surface for someone who writes "cancer". Alongside it, a traditional keyword index catches the exact technical terms that a meaning-based comparison can blur.
Second, ranking. The strongest few dozen candidate opportunities are read by a large language model, which reorders them and writes the short explanation you see on each card. This stage is what can tell that a grant mentioning your technique is actually restricted to clinical trials, or that an unfamiliar-sounding programme is squarely in your area.
Account → Eligibility asks two questions about you rather than about your research: whether you are a postdoctoral researcher, and whether you are early in an independent faculty career. Some awards are restricted by career stage, and that is not something your publications can tell us.
Ticking a box changes which opportunities are considered for your weekly recommendations, not how they are scored. If you say you are a postdoc, the general pool of candidates is replaced by postdoc-eligible ones — most of the corpus names a principal investigator, so without this your recommendations would fill up with awards you cannot hold. If you say you are early-career faculty, half the general pool is reserved for early-career mechanisms such as NSF CAREER and the NIH K-series; those are deliberately broad about subject matter, so a purely topical ranking tends to bury them. Limited-submission and internal opportunities are drawn the same way either way, because whether something goes through an internal nomination has nothing to do with your career stage.
Leaving both unticked is not the same as answering "no". With no answer we fall back to reading the job title in your department's directory, which is the only thing we had before — and which is wrong often enough to be worth correcting: it cannot recognise a research assistant professorship, and it cannot know whether you are still inside a years-since-PhD window. Answering explicitly, either way, overrides that guess.
Nothing here hides opportunities from you. Browse and search still show the whole corpus, and you can filter it by the same tags from the Grants page at any time.
It is a short description of your research — a summary plus lists of topics, methods, fields and application areas — written from your interests, bio, publications and awards. It exists so that matching has something consistent to compare against, and it is regenerated when the information underneath it changes.
You cannot edit the summary text directly, because it would be overwritten the next time it is regenerated. What you can do is change what it is written from: update your research interests and bio, add project interests, and fix your publication list. Those edits are what move the summary — and your matches with it.
Almost always because the information we hold about you is incomplete or dated — a sparse department page, or a publication list that stops a few years back. Adding project interests and fixing your publications is the fastest fix. Use Ignore on anything you never want to see again.
Searching people instead of grants. Describe a problem, a technique or a funding call and it returns the faculty whose work fits — useful for building a team for a large proposal, finding a collaborator, or identifying who to approach about a limited-submission opportunity.
Publications are re-checked twice a week, funding opportunities and your institution's award records once a week, expertise summaries and recommendations over the weekend, and the digest goes out Monday morning. You never have to wait for it, though — the on-demand import buttons on your account pages run immediately.
No. We do not train or fine-tune any model on your profile, your publications or your activity on the platform.
We do send text to commercial AI services to be processed — your expertise summary is written by one, and grant rankings are produced by another. We use these providers under business terms that do not permit training on the content we send. What gets sent is the professional information already on your profile: your interests, bio, publication titles and abstracts, and award titles and abstracts. Your email address, password and account activity are never part of it.
Your saved and ignored lists and your searches are yours. Platform administrators at your institution can see aggregate usage, and can see individual accounts when supporting you, but your activity is not shown to other faculty.
Email support@grantaffinity.com. Bear in mind that deleting your user account will not remove your faculty profile listing.
Yes, at any time, and in two ways. Account → Notifications has a switch for the weekly digest. Every email also carries an unsubscribe link at the bottom that works in one click, without logging in.
Opting out costs you nothing else: recommendations keep being computed and are always on your dashboard.
Your highest-priority matches with a line on why each one fits, new opportunities relevant to you, and a count of everything added across the platform that week. It goes out Monday morning.
It needs four things: the digest switched on, a claimed profile, a confirmed claim, and a verified email address. Account shows the state of each. If all four look right and nothing is arriving, check your spam folder, then email us.
Email support@grantaffinity.com. Feature requests are as welcome as problem reports.