Professor website examples that actually work

If you are a professor — or about to become one — your web presence is probably a university profile page you didn't write and can't easily change. This page shows what faculty do about that: six real professor websites (personal academic websites, if you prefer the longer phrase), each reviewed critically — what it does well, what it's missing, and what's worth stealing for your own. At the end there's one example you can actually click through, and an honest word on tools — including the cases where ours is the wrong one.

All six sites were visited and reviewed on August 5, 2026; roles and affiliations are as stated on each site at that time. None of these professors are affiliated with Scilio — several are hosted on platforms that compete with us. Sites change; if an annotation no longer matches, tell us: support@scilio.app.

What a professor's website has to do (that a student's doesn't)

A PhD student's website has one job: make its owner findable and hireable. A professor's website has at least three audiences pulling in different directions. Prospective advisees want to know whether you are taking students and what your group actually works on. Your students want the course list and the syllabus. Colleagues, editors and journalists want your publications and a bio they can lift without emailing you. A university profile page serves none of them well — you can't restructure it, updates go through someone else, and it vanishes or moves the day you do.

That means three decisions a student never has to make:

The lab boundary. Is this your site or your group's? Both models work — you'll see both below — but the sites that feel confused are the ones that never chose.
The advising signal. One sentence — “I am taking PhD students for 2026” or “I am not” — saves you and every hopeful applicant weeks of ambiguity. Almost nobody writes it. The best example below is the one that does.
Teaching real estate. Are your courses a line on your CV, or pages students actually use? The professors who treat teaching as a first-class part of the site get bookmarked by hundreds of students a semester; the rest get bookmarked by hiring committees once.

If you want the full planning walkthrough before looking at examples, we keep one at how to plan an academic website, step by step.

Six real professor websites, annotated

Each of these was visited and reviewed on August 5, 2026. None is affiliated with Scilio, and several are built on competitor platforms — that's the point. For a broader set across every career stage, see our 12 real academic website examples.

Debrielle Jacques — Clinical child psychology, University of Washington

Owlstown, on a custom domain · debriellejacques.com

An assistant professor's site with the full faculty structure: Publications, Projects, Courses, Service & Community Work, Awards, and a contact form. The homepage frames her research agenda as open questions about parent psychopathology and child development, which reads like a person thinking rather than a brochure.

What's missing: Anything for prospective graduate students — no mentorship structure, no “how to join” — and publications aren't linked from the homepage itself.

What to steal: The Service & Community Work page. Service is the invisible third of a faculty job; giving it a page makes it count.

Vera Gluscevic — Physics and astronomy, USC

GitHub Pages · veragluscevic.github.io

An associate professor studying dark matter, with a site that moves in one clean line from credentials (Caltech PhD, IAS) to research mission, plus a group page, a teaching page and a downloadable CV.

What's missing: The publication record lives only inside that CV PDF — and a PDF download is where discoverability goes to die. There's also no pathway for prospective students, on a site whose owner leads a group.

What to steal: The one-page clarity. You know who she is and why it matters within ten seconds.

Andrew Heiss — Public policy, Georgia State University

Quarto, custom domain · andrewheiss.com

An assistant professor's site built with Quarto, nine sections deep, with a copyright line reading 2007–2025 — eighteen years of continuous web presence. The distinctive move: each course is its own standalone site, linked from the teaching page, so students bookmark the course rather than the person.

What's missing: The homepage surfaces little recent work, and there's no publication archive visible from the front page.

What to steal: Courses as first-class products. If you teach the same course for years, it deserves its own address.

Martin Bulla — Ornithology, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

al-folio (Jekyll) on GitHub Pages · martinbulla.github.io

An associate professor's site on the al-folio template: about, projects, publications, a dedicated repositories section — and one line most sites never dare to write: “Last updated May 29, 2025.”

What's missing: Teaching and advising don't exist here at all. As a researcher's site it works; as a professor's it's half a site.

What to steal: The last-updated line. It costs one sentence and buys total trust — a visitor knows instantly that what they're reading is current, and the day it isn't, that too is honest.

Mark P. M. Dean — Condensed matter physics, Brookhaven National Laboratory

al-folio (Jekyll) · markdean.info

The opposite pole from a personal page: a group leader's site that is really a lab site — People, Openings, Group notes and separate Publications and Preprints sections, with news current to July 2026. An honest note from us: if this is the site you need, you need a tool that builds group sites. Scilio doesn't — we build individual portfolios, and this pattern is out of our lane.

What's missing: A CV and any teaching presence — deliberately, because this site is a recruitment and communication instrument for the group.

What to steal: The Openings page. A portfolio can recruit for you — one page saying who you're looking for.

Sahir Bhatnagar — Biostatistics, McGill University (adjunct) and industry

al-folio (Jekyll) on GitHub Pages · sahirbhatnagar.com

An adjunct professor who is also an associate director in industry, and a site that carries both identities without confusion. The software page quantifies impact — R packages “downloaded over 350,000 times,” as his site states — and the homepage contains the single most useful sentence in this whole list: he is no longer taking graduate students, stated plainly.

What's missing: Teaching materials are sparse, and the profile photo is labeled 2023.

What to steal: The availability sentence. Whichever direction yours points, write it.

What these six have in common

1.
The advising black hole. Four of the six say nothing about whether or how students can join — the single most common miss, on sites whose most motivated readers are prospective advisees. The two exceptions (Dean's Openings page, Bhatnagar's not-taking-students line) fix it in a sentence.
2.
Publications hide. A CV-only PDF, a homepage that redirects elsewhere, inline links without a unified list — the thing every academic visitor wants most is routinely the hardest to find.
3.
Freshness is binary. Sites either show their dates (Bulla's last-updated line, Dean's July 2026 news) or hope you won't ask. There is no middle.
4.
The lab boundary blurs with seniority. Jacques's site is fully personal, Gluscevic's is half group, Dean's is fully lab. Every model works — chosen. What doesn't work is drifting between them.

One you can click through

Screenshots — ours included — can't show you the thing that matters: what a site feels like to navigate. So here's a live one: Prof. Ingrid Vasseur, a neuroscience professor's portfolio with a full faculty publication record, including a labeled preprint, in the Serif theme. Ingrid is a fictional persona and her photo is AI-generated — she exists so you can click around a finished professor site without us parading a real customer. She's built on Scilio (that's us) — her page wears the Serif theme, one of twenty a portfolio can be dressed in.

Getting one without burning a sabbatical

Three honest paths, depending on who you are:

You write code and want total control. Fork a template — three of the six sites above run on al-folio, and Heiss's runs on Quarto. Free, endlessly customizable, and you own every pixel; the price is maintenance. We compare academic website templates — code you fork vs demos you click.

You need a full faculty site — courses, service pages, maybe a group. A builder like Owlstown handles that structure (Jacques's site above is built on it, custom domain included), and university WordPress instances exist for exactly this. We compare every academic website builder with date-stamped prices.

You want a publications-first site, done in an evening. That's the case we built Scilio for: import your publication list via BibTeX or DOI, pick one of twenty themes, and see who's reading with built-in visitor analytics. Held to the same standard as everyone else on this page: Scilio doesn't do lab or group sites, doesn't support custom domains, and publishing requires the paid plan — the editor is free.

Build your own

The professors above all started with the same blank page and less time than you have this week. Build your portfolio in the free editor — publications, projects and all — and pay only when you're ready to publish it.