Phinder® The PhD Match Finder
Find the right research expertise for complex, real-world problems.
The Problem
Hard problems are often hard because the missing piece lies outside your own field. A mechanical engineer may realize that the real bottleneck is chemistry. The expertise exists, but it sits in another discipline, outside the language and methods you already know.
Too often, finding that expertise still means starting from scratch: asking around, relying on personal networks, navigating unfamiliar university structures, and hoping someone can point you to the right person. That is not a one-off inconvenience. It is a recurring structural problem, and Phinder was built to reduce it.
What Phinder Does
Phinder helps organizations find relevant research expertise. Using public sources — publications, projects, university profiles — Phinder builds searchable competence descriptions for researchers. That makes it possible to discover who knows what based on actual work, not visibility or self-promotion.
The goal is simple: make it easier for the right expert and the right problem to find each other.
Who It's For
For Companies and Organizations
Describe your need in plain language and get researcher matches with supporting context. Phinder is built for problems where the expertise exists but is difficult to locate through ordinary channels.
For Researchers
Be discoverable for what you actually work on. Phinder reduces the need for self-promotion by making public academic work easier to understand from the outside. You stay in control of your profile and your terms.
For Universities
Make researcher expertise more visible beyond the university. Phinder supports knowledge exchange by helping external actors discover relevant competence — and what starts as a small engagement can develop into deeper collaboration that benefits the institution.
How It Works
1. Describe the Problem
Write what you are looking for in your own words — a technical challenge, a research question, or a specific competence area.
2. Phinder Identifies Expertise
Your request is matched against researcher profiles built from publications, projects, and other public academic information.
3. Review the Results
Each match includes context for why that researcher is relevant, so you can quickly assess fit and decide where to look deeper.
The Story Behind Phinder
One thing about how I work is that I don't like solving the same problem twice. When I keep running into the same bottleneck, I stop treating it as a one-off and start asking what kind of system would make it go away.
During my PhD in tribology at Luleå University of Technology, I kept seeing the same pattern. The hardest questions sat between disciplines. Solving them depended on finding the right specialist at the right moment — but that process was driven more by luck and personal networks than by any good system.
I could have kept solving those cases one by one. Instead, I became interested in the root problem: why is it so hard to discover who knows what? My first attempt was manual — asking fellow PhD students to describe their expertise and the kinds of collaboration they were open to. The idea was useful, but it didn't scale.
Large language models made it possible to build that system properly. I registered the Phinder trademark one day before ChatGPT launched publicly, built an early version with fewer than 50 researchers, and later demoed the project at OpenAI's first DevDay in San Francisco.
Today, Phinder covers more than a thousand researchers. But the core idea is still the same: when a bottleneck keeps coming back, the answer is not to patch it again — it's to build a better system.
/Erik Nyberg
Contact: [email protected]