Academic CV (US/EU Faculty/Postdoc)

A complete guide to assembling an academic CV tailored for US and EU faculty and postdoctoral positions. Covers section ordering conventions used in North American and European applications, mentoring and service statements, h-index / i10 caveats, and cross-referencing the new NSF/NIH biosketch format. Produces a single, comprehensive document that satisfies the conventions of a research-intensive (R1) application packet.

When to use

• Preparing an application packet for a tenure-track assistant professor position (R1 or R2).
• Preparing an application for a postdoctoral scholar position at a US or EU institution."
• Building the "long-form CV" that underpins a biosketch, a tenure dossier, or a promotion file.
• Annual review materials for assistant or associate professors maintaining a current CV.
• Fellowship applications that request a CV in addition to a personal statement (Hertz, Ford, AAAS Mass Media).

When NOT to use

• Industry or consulting resume — see ors-career-navigation-industry-transition. An academic CV is far too long and is structured for academic evaluation, not recruiter triage.
• NIH/NSF biosketch only (5-page) — this skill covers the long-form CV; for the short biosketch, follow the agency's current format page and the agency's SciENcv/NIH instructions.
• Tenure dossier case — see ors-career-navigation-tenure-dossier. The CV is a component of the dossier, but the dossier requires research statement, teaching portfolio, and external letters.
• Faculty interview packet — see ors-career-navigation-faculty-interview for job talk and chalk talk preparation.

Prerequisites

• Complete, accurate record of publications (DOIs, PubMed IDs, ORCID if available).
• Funding history with agency, grant number, role, total amount, and period.
• Teaching history including course numbers, enrollment, evaluations, and modality.
• Mentoring history: trainees' names, level, project, current position.
• ORCID (free at orcid.org) — strongly recommended; increasingly expected by search committees.

Core workflow

1. Choose a section ordering convention

Two common orderings:

US R1 / R2 convention (preferred when applying in the United States):

1. Contact information / header
2. Education
3. Professional appointments / positions
4. Publications
5. Funding and grants
6. Teaching
7. Mentoring
8. Professional service
9. Invited talks
10. Software, datasets, and code releases
11. Awards and honors
12. Professional memberships

EU / Max Planck / CNRS / Helmholtz convention (preferred for European applications):

1. Personal information
2. Education
3. Current and previous positions
4. Research grants and funding
5. Supervision of students and postdocs
6. Teaching activities
7. Publications (often first in some German forms)
8. Invited talks
9. Conference organization
10. Service to the community
11. Awards
12. Public engagement

The order of Education and Positions is largely fixed; publications and funding are higher-weighted in the United States than in many EU applications, where funding is a separate, prominent section.

2. Header / contact information

Include name (with any prior or maiden name if relevant for publication linkage), current position and institution, mailing address, email, and ORCID. Do not include a photograph in US applications; some EU forms do request one — check the call.

3. Education

List degrees in reverse chronological order. For each entry, include:

• Degree (PhD, MSc, BSc)
• Field and sub-field
• Institution, city, country
• Year of conferral
• Dissertation title and advisor
• Defense date (if different from conferral)

Include a section for "Postdoctoral training" immediately after if applying to a tenure-track position.

4. Professional appointments and positions

Reverse chronological list. For each role, include rank, department, institution, dates, and a one-line description of responsibilities or scope. Distinguish visiting, acting, and interim positions clearly. For a tenure-track applicant, this section is short; for a senior associate or full professor case, it is lengthy and may include prior administrative appointments.

5. Publications

Use clear sub-sections:

• Peer-reviewed articles — most important; subdivide by author role:
  • Corresponding/senior-author papers
  • First-author pre-prints and papers
  • Co-author papers
• Preprints — list with DOI or server name (bioRxiv, arXiv, medRxiv, ChemRxiv). Many search committees want to see in-prep work.
• Reviews and chapters
• Books and edited volumes
• Conference proceedings — distinguish peer-reviewed (often high-quality) from abstracts.
• Theses — your own dissertation, if recent.

For each entry, use a consistent citation style. Many CVs use the same style as the field's flagship journal. Include DOIs, and bold your name to aid committee scanning.

If using Google Scholar metrics, do not list them in the publications section. Use a separate, optional "Bibliometrics" section (see h-index caveats below).

6. Funding and grants

Two formats: a compact list (one line per grant) or a structured table.

Distinguish "Current" and "Completed" subsections. For training or mentored grants (NSF GRFP, NIH F-series), list with role "Predoctoral Fellow" or "Postdoctoral Trainee".

7. Teaching

Subdivide:

• Classroom courses — course number, title, level (undergraduate/graduate), institution, term(s), enrollment, your role (Instructor of record, Co-instructor, TA, Guest lecturer).
• Curriculum development — new courses you designed; the section motivates a teaching-focused hire.
• Guest lectures — list when there are many; for a senior CV, summarize by year.

Include student evaluation summary statistics in a teaching portfolio, not the CV — see ors-career-navigation-tenure-dossier.

8. Mentoring

Critical for the assistant professor case. Subdivide:

• Postdoctoral scholars mentored — name, project, period, current position, joint publications.
• Doctoral students — same fields; distinguish chair from committee membership.
• Master's and undergraduate thesis students
• Rotation students / visiting scholars
• High-school interns / outreach mentees — only if applying to institutions with strong outreach expectations.

Include co-authored papers as a metric: list mentees and count their first-author papers with you.

9. Professional service

Subdivide:

• Editorial service — journal editorial boards, guest editorships, ad hoc reviewing (summarize by year and journal for senior CVs; for an assistant, list the most relevant 5-10 journals).
• Grant review panels — agency, study section / panel name, dates.
• Conference service — program committees, session organization.
• Department, school, and university service — committees, governance roles.
• Service to the discipline — society leadership, working groups.

10. Invited talks

Two sub-sections:

• Plenary / keynote — small set, top-of-list.
• Invited seminars and conference talks — for a junior CV, list all; for a senior CV, summarize by year with total counts and notable venues.

Include talk title, venue, city, date. For seminars, indicate whether in person or virtual.

11. Software, datasets, and code releases

Increasingly expected in computational and quantitative fields. Include:

• Software packages (name, language, license, GitHub URL, citation if any).
• Public datasets released.
• Workflows or pipelines (Nextflow, Snakemake, CWL) — cross-reference relevant ors-* skills.
• Database contributions.

12. Awards and honors

Reverse chronological. Distinguish peer-reviewed (NSF CAREER, Packard, Pew) from internal (teaching awards, dissertation prizes). Include year, awarding body, and a one-line description if the award is not well-known.

13. Optional bibliometrics

If you include a "Bibliometrics" section, present it transparently:

• h-index and i10 (Google Scholar)
• Total citations (with the database and date)
• Field-normalized indicators (Field-Weighted Citation Impact from Scopus, Relative Citation Rate from iCite, etc.)

Caveats that should accompany the metrics:

• Database choice matters: Google Scholar counts preprints and predatory-journal citations; Web of Science and Scopus are more conservative. Do not mix numbers across databases.
• Field and seniority matter: h-index correlates with career length; a field-normalized indicator is more informative.
• Authorship position matters: corresponding/senior-author citation count differs from total citations; committee members read these numbers with care.
• The h-index was proposed in 2005 (Hirsch, PNAS) as a quick indicator; it has known weaknesses (insensitivity to highly cited single papers, insensitivity to authorship position, database-dependent counts).

For US applications, a brief metrics block is acceptable but not required; for European applications, especially in continental Europe, it is often expected.

14. Cross-referencing the biosketch

The CV is the long-form document. The biosketch is the short, structured form required by NSF and NIH. Keep these in sync.

NSF PAPPG 24-1 (current at the time of writing) biosketch requirements (verify against the latest PAPPG):

• Personal statement — up to one page; relate training to the proposed work.
• Publications — most relevant to the proposal; full list may be in the CV or the SciENcv-generated PDF.
• Synergistic activities — up to one page; up to five examples of broader impacts and integrated activities.
• Mentoring plan (where required) — see mentorship-teaching/ors-mentorship-onboarding.

NIH biosketch structure (5 pages max for each Senior/Key person):

• Personal Statement — tailer the statement to the specific application.
• Positions and Honors
• Contributions to Science — up to four contributions, each with up to four publications or research products; a short narrative on the impact of each.
• Ongoing and completed research support — list every active grant that benefits the project, with overlap and effort statements.

SciENcv (NIH's biosketch generator) integrates with ORCID, eRA Commons, and NSF. Use it to keep the personal statement and positions sections in sync.

Code patterns

LaTeX CV skeleton

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{titlesec}

\titleformat{\section}{\large\bfseries}{}{0em}{}
\titleformat{\subsection}{\normalsize\bfseries\itshape}{}{0em}{}

\newcommand{\entry}[4]{%
  \noindent\textbf{#1} \hfill #2 \\
  \textit{#3} \hfill #4 \\
}

\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
% Header

\section*{Contact}
[Name] \textbar{} [Title] \textbar{} [Institution] \textbar{} [Email] \textbar{} ORCID: [ID]

\section*{Education}
\entry{Year}{Degree}{Field, Institution}{Advisor}

\section*{Positions}
\entry{Year--Present}{Rank}{Department, Institution}{}

\section*{Publications}
\textbf{Corresponding-author papers}\\
[Author list, title, journal, year, doi]\\
\textbf{First-author papers}\\
[Author list, title, journal, year, doi]

\section*{Funding}
[Table or list, structured as in step 6]

\section*{Teaching}
[Course, term, enrollment, role]

\section*{Mentoring}
[Name, level, period, current position]

\section*{Professional service}
[Editorial, panels, committees]

\section*{Invited talks}
[Title, venue, date]

\section*{Software and datasets}
[Name, URL, license]

\section*{Awards and honors}
[Year, award, body]

\end{document}

Markdown CV (for Pandoc-rendered HTML or PDF)

# [Name]
[Position], [Institution] | [email] | ORCID: [id]

## Education
- **PhD**, Field, Institution, Year. Advisor: [Name].

## Positions
- **Year--Present**: Rank, Department, Institution.

## Publications
### Peer-reviewed
- Author1, **Jayaram P**, Author3. "Title." *Journal* (Year). doi:...

## Funding
| Grant | Role | Agency | Total | Period |
|-------|------|--------|-------|--------|
| Title | PI | NSF | $X | 2024-2029 |

ORCID-aligned publication export

# Pull ORCID works for cross-referencing the CV
import requests
orcid_id = "0000-0000-0000-0000"
r = requests.get(
    f"https://pub.orcid.org/v3.0/{orcid_id}/works",
    headers={"Accept": "application/json"},
)
works = r.json().get("group", [])
for w in works:
    title = w["work-summary"][0]["title"]["title"]["value"]
    year = w["work-summary"][0]["publication-date"]
    print(f"{year}: {title}")

Common pitfalls

Validation

A complete academic CV satisfies:

• Header with current contact information and ORCID
• Education and positions in reverse chronological order
• Publications subdivided by role; bold your name; DOIs included
• Funding table with role, agency, mechanism, total, period, status
• Teaching history with course numbers, terms, roles
• Mentoring history with trainee names, periods, current positions
• Professional service in editorial, panel, conference, university, and discipline sub-sections
• Invited talks with venue and date
• Software and datasets listed for computational work
• Awards in reverse chronological order
• Optional bibliometrics with database, date, and caveats
• Cross-reference check: every grant in the CV appears in the biosketch's "research support" section; every publication appears in SciENcv with consistent author name and order
• Page count consistent with norms (assistant professor: 10-25 pages; tenured full professor: 30-60 pages; the CV is a living document and grows)
• PDF/A compliant; accessible (tagged headings)

Open alternatives

References

• NSF PAPPG (Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide): https://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/pappg/
• NIH Biosketch Format Page: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/forms.htm
• SciENcv: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sciencv/
• ORCID: https://orcid.org/
• Hirsch JE (2005). "An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output that takes into account the effect of multiple coauthorship." PNAS 102(46): 16569-16572.
• Bornmann L, Marx W (2012). "HistCite analysis of papers constituting the h-index research front." Journal of Informetrics.
• University of California, Berkeley Office of Faculty Affairs: faculty CV guidance
• Helmholtz Association guidelines for CV (European academic CV conventions)
• DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment): https://sfdora.org/ — discusses responsible use of journal-based metrics.
• COARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment): https://coara.eu/ — European framework for assessment reform.

Related Skills

• ors-career-navigation-tenure-dossier — assembling the tenure case from the CV plus statements
• ors-career-navigation-faculty-interview — job talk, chalk talk, and start-up package
• ors-career-navigation-fellowship-application — predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowship packets
• ors-career-navigation-industry-transition — translating the CV to an industry resume
• ors-mentorship-teaching-ors-mentorship-onboarding — onboarding mentees (for the mentoring section)
• ors-research-grants-nsf-standard — NSF proposal structure (mentoring plan, broader impacts)

Changelog

• 1.0.0 (2026-06-10): Initial adaptation by Pradyumna Jayaram. Compiled from public agency guidance (NSF PAPPG, NIH biosketch), university faculty affairs offices (UC Berkeley, Stanford), and bibliometric literature (Hirsch 2005, DORA, CoARA).