UC Tech News is excited to share the stories of the people and projects behind the winners of the 2026 UC Tech Awards.
Team Name: ScholarConnect Team
Award Category: AI Impact
Location: UC Irvine
Team Members:
- Roxane Cohen Silver, Vice Provost, Project Sponsor, Institutional Research, Assessment, and Planning, UC Irvine
- Kian Colestock, AVC and CIO, IT Sponsor, Office of Information Technology, UC Irvine
- Gillian Hayes, Vice Provost, Academic Personnel, UC Irvine
- Andrea Bell, Strategic Program Director, Institutional Research, Assessment, and Planning, UC Irvine
- Max Garrick, Acting Director, Student & Academic Services, Office of Information Technology, UC Irvine
- Albert Chi, Manager, Chancellor & Provost IT, Office of Information Technology, UC Irvine
- Tarique Shams, AI Software Engineer, Chancellor & Provost IT, Office of Information Technology, UC Irvine
The ScholarConnect Team won the Gold AI Impact Award at the 2026 UC Tech Awards for their work on ScholarConnect Team. The partnership between the Office of Information Technology and Institutional Research, Assessment, and Planning at UC Irvine elevates UC Irvine’s research visibility with AI, turning CVs into searchable faculty profiles.
Project Summary
The ScholarConnect team saw an opportunity to make faculty expertise easier to discover and connect with by addressing the long-standing challenge of having valuable information about research, publications, and areas of expertise scattered across inconsistent sources, such as personal websites, CVs, and UC Irvine systems. As a result, researchers, journalists, funders, policymakers, and community partners did not always have a reliable way to identify the right UC Irvine expert.
The challenge was compounded by the nature of faculty CVs, which are often the most comprehensive and current record of scholarly achievement but vary widely in format, structure, length, and disciplinary conventions. Any solution would need to accurately interpret and organize information from these unstructured documents, integrate with existing campus systems, and build faculty confidence that their work would be represented accurately and transparently.
Action
The ScholarConnect team developed an AI-powered platform that transforms faculty CVs into structured, searchable profiles, creating a single destination for discovering UC Irvine expertise. Rather than asking faculty to build and maintain another online presence, ScholarConnect works from CVs, which most academics already keep up to date. Using secure AI tools, the platform extracts key information such as publications, degrees, honors, and areas of expertise, then generates a draft profile that faculty can review, edit, and control before publication.
The platform also introduced a new way to connect people with expertise across campus. Users can search by topic, question, name, or keyword and receive faculty matches along with AI-generated explanations of why each expert is relevant. To ensure accuracy and trust, the team built robust quality assurance processes that combined human review with AI-assisted validation before profiles are published.
ScholarConnect advances UC’s research, education, and public service missions by making faculty expertise easier to discover, helping foster collaboration, connect students with mentors, and increase public access to UC Irvine’s scholarly knowledge and research impact.
Results and Impact
ScholarConnect is now live at scholarconnect.uci.edu as a public resource, providing a single, searchable destination for discovering UC Irvine faculty expertise. What began as a pilot with 60 faculty participants has grown to more than 600 faculty members opting in campuswide, demonstrating strong adoption of a platform designed to minimize the time and effort required from busy researchers.
Beyond improving discoverability, ScholarConnect is helping UC Irvine modernize how faculty expertise is shared and maintained. By reducing reliance on manual profile updates and consolidating multiple legacy systems, the platform creates a more sustainable and scalable approach to showcasing faculty accomplishments. Ongoing enhancements, including expanded search capabilities and additional research data integrations, will continue to strengthen connections among researchers, students, journalists, funders, and community partners.
Measurable outcomes include:
- Growth from a 60-faculty pilot to more than 600 participating faculty members.
- A streamlined profile creation process that significantly reduces administrative effort.
- A sustainable model that keeps faculty information current through existing academic workflows.
- A scalable, transferable approach that could be adapted by other campuses seeking to improve discovery of faculty expertise.
