Universities: Present Your Lecturers and Researchers Better

An international early-career researcher is looking for a postdoc position. She has three universities on her shortlist and is comparing the chairs she would apply to. She opens your institute's page and looks at the team she would be researching with. What she finds is sobering. The chair holder stares out of a passport photo clearly taken over ten years ago, cropped from a larger image. Two doctoral students have no photo at all, just a grey circle with their initials. And the pictures that do exist visibly come from different decades and cameras. You do world-class research. Your digital presence looks like something found in an attic.

This is the peculiar contradiction of many universities. In labs and lecture halls, cutting-edge research takes shape, third-party funding is raised in the millions, and there is competition for the brightest minds in the world. But the presence of the people who carry that excellence is shamefully neglected. Yet a chair's staff page is today often the first point of contact with talent, funders and partners around the globe.

The Staff Page Is the Chair's Calling Card

Science is a competition for people. Universities compete internationally for the best students, the most promising doctoral candidates, the most renowned professorships. And these people research thoroughly before they commit. They look at who works at a chair, how the team comes across, whether it is a place they can see themselves. The staff page is the most visited page of any institute, far ahead of the publication list.

A professional, up-to-date portrait signals to an applicant from abroad that quality matters here, that this is the right place for me. An outdated passport photo or a grey placeholder, by contrast, creates an unconscious doubt. Might the chair be as neglected as its presence. That is unfair to excellent research, but that is how a first impression works. People read the care of the presence as the care of the institution.

For international visibility, that is decisive. A researcher in Singapore or Boston considering a collaboration may know your institute only from the website. What she sees there shapes her picture of your university long before the first email is written. A strong, consistent presence of your people gives you an edge in the global competition that you should not let slip.

Researchers Are Both Brand and Ambassador

At a university, people are more than employees, they are public figures. Professors are invited to give talks, they give interviews, they sit on expert panels, they appear in the media when their topic is in the headlines. Their portraits get reused, in conference programmes, in newspaper articles, on congress websites. A researcher today is always also a small brand, and that brand needs a good picture.

Think of the moment a journalist needs a quick, print-ready photo of your climate researcher because he is asked to comment on a current event. If only a pixelated passport photo exists, that is what ends up in the newspaper and shapes the public image of your university. A high-quality portrait, by contrast, elevates every appearance and carries your good name with it. Your people's pictures travel further than you think, and they carry your reputation to places you do not control.

The same applies to the students you want to attract. Anyone deciding on a master's programme looks at the lecturers they would learn from. Approachable, competent-looking portraits make a programme more attractive, because they show that real, reachable people teach here. The grey placeholder, by contrast, tells the prospect there is no one here who will care about me.

Academic Life Is a Photo Chaos

Here lies the real difficulty. Hardly any organisation has turnover as high as a chair. Doctoral students come and move on after four years, postdocs stay two semesters, research assistants change every year, visiting professors are only there for a semester. The pool of people at an institute is constantly renewing itself. A one-off photo shoot would already be outdated before the pictures went online.

Add to that the distributed, often chaotic nature of the work. Some sit in the office, others in the lab, others again commute between fieldwork and lecture hall. There is no central body taking care of consistent pictures, every chair does its own thing. So every newcomer uploads whatever photo they happen to have, in every conceivable quality, and out comes the familiar jumble of decades and formats.

A consistent visual style across the whole chair would act like a statement there. It shows a research group that presents itself as a team, professional and united, rather than a loose pile of individual pictures. That strengthens the institute's identity both internally and externally. It is just that this is practically impossible to maintain with traditional means given the turnover, which is why it almost never succeeds.

How to Get Your Institute's People in Shape

The first step is a deliberate decision that the staff page is not a sideshow but a calling card worth investing in. Set a consistent standard for what a portrait at your institute looks like, and make sure every new doctoral student, every new postdoc gets that picture right away, not only after years or never at all.

Because traditional photo appointments cannot keep up with the high turnover and distributed nature of a university, it is worth looking at modern, studio-free solutions. Today, a simple selfie that a new research assistant takes herself in two minutes can be turned into a professional portrait in a consistent institute style, with no photo appointment, no travel, even for the visiting professor who stays only a semester. That way the picture of the postdoc starting next week instantly matches the established professor's. In the end, what counts is that your digital presence looks as excellent as the research actually taking shape at your institute.