Two Stony Brook University computer science students have played key roles in developing Nexus, a website designed to streamline the process of finding undergraduate research opportunities on campus.

Junior Brian Lin and freshman Madhav Rapelli joined forces with sociology sophomore Russell Erfan to create Nexus, which aims to centralize the search for research opportunities by directly connecting students with faculty based on skills, majors, and research interests.

Lin, the lead backend developer, focuses on the site's core functionality. "I realized how difficult research was to find here, despite our school being known as a research school," Lin explained. "Since the codes and databases had a lot of the languages that I was very passionate about like Node and Sequel, I wanted to join in and learn more from them."

Rapelli, the lead frontend developer, is responsible for the user interface. "I take care of all the operations on the screen that users interact with, that could be making things look pretty or having things more accessible like drop-down buttons," Rapelli said. "Users can sort and then get the data they want from our website."

The team plans to incorporate AI features to enhance user interaction. Lin shared their vision: "We will definitely be hopefully implementing an AI chatbot where if someone were interested in these certain topics, they can ask the AI and the AI would have all the knowledge. We would train the model on all the professors here and the AI would spit back a couple of professors that perfectly match their interests."

Nexus launched its beta version on December 1, 2024, with the full release planned for spring 2025. Read the full story in The Statesman. 

Summary by Yuganshu Jain