Every energy and climate researcher in Maryland, in one place.
Today that expertise sits across 28 university websites, each in its own format, with no way to search between them. This is one searchable roster, built for MEIA staff and the founders they work with. Below is a working demo on real University of Maryland data, the method behind it, and the proposal to build it out.
Describe a venture. Meet its researchers.
Live demo on 14 energy-research faculty from UMD's Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, the sample slice of a ~90-person roster. Type anything, or start from an example.
The whole state, surveyed
Every four-year institution in Maryland, checked for energy and green-tech research activity.
| Institution | Energy research | Researchers |
|---|---|---|
| UMD College Park R1 | Maryland Energy Innovation Institute (MEI²), CEEE thermal-systems center, CALCE battery reliability | 91 verified |
| Johns Hopkins R1 | Ralph O'Connor Sustainable Energy Institute: grid decarbonization, offshore wind, net-zero policy; includes APL | 95 verified |
| UMBC R1 | AMEE lab (batteries, fuel cells, hydrogen), thermal-fluids group, grid modeling, NASA GESTAR II climate consortium | ~20–30 est. |
| UMCES | Statewide environmental-science labs; $11M offshore-wind research partnership with US Wind | ~15–25 est. |
| Morgan State R2 · HBCU | CAESECT energy-systems center (fuel cells, solar, wind, biomass), DOE urban-climate lab, NSF CREST materials | ~10–15 est. |
| 8 more institutions | Frostburg's smart-grid cluster, Naval Academy's energy-security center (2024), Hood's endowed biofuels chair, Towson, UMES + three more HBCUs | ~15–30 est. |
| Statewide | Energy-tech core (roughly doubles counting climate science & energy policy) | ~230–290 |
Verified = counted by name from institute directories, July 2026. Estimates are roster-based; the Phase-1 extraction pass replaces them with per-person classifications. Community colleges (16) excluded: workforce training, not research.
How the data is built, and why you can trust it
We collect the public faculty pages from each university's website, carefully and within each site's terms.
Every school lays out its pages differently. We read them all into one consistent format, and never add anything a page doesn't actually say.
Free-text research blurbs map to a controlled vocabulary of research areas, tuned with MEIA's domain knowledge, so "solid-state batteries" means the same thing at UMD, Hopkins, and UMBC. This is what makes research comparable and matchable across schools.
You describe what you're building in plain words. Instead of matching keywords, the system finds the researchers whose work actually fits what you mean, ranks them, and tells you in plain English why each one came up.
A web tool MEIA brands and links from its site, plus a one-page match memo per entrepreneur for staff-brokered introductions. Runs on inexpensive managed infrastructure; the data and results are MEIA's.
Each researcher entry links back to the source page it was read from, with a fetch date, so any claim can be checked in one click.
Before we hand anything over, we spot-check a random sample against the original university pages and report exactly how accurate it is, so you never have to just take our word for it.
All data comes from public university pages, but the public tool shows profile links only; direct contact details stay in MEIA's staff view until the opt-in question is settled.
Faculty rosters drift. Every page shows when it was last crawled, and the refresh option below keeps the inventory living instead of aging into a snapshot.
Research Match, statewide
Every four-year institution in Maryland with energy or climate research, all four HBCUs included. About 250 to 450 researchers, with two full years of support.
After Year 2, $3,000 a year to keep it live, optional. If the budget needs to be smaller, coverage can narrow to the anchor institutions (UMD, Johns Hopkins, and UMCES) for $18,500.
The build runs in three stages:
Match engine, one school
The reference build everything else scales from: UMD, end to end.
- Full ~90-faculty MEI² roster, structured on the locked schema
- Research-area taxonomy defined with your team
- Production matching with plain-English reasoning on every result
- The founder-facing match page and the staff match memo with draft introduction
Multi-school rollout
Additional universities on the same pipeline: Johns Hopkins (ROSEI, 95 researchers verified), UMCES, UMBC, and Morgan State, normalized to the shared taxonomy so the match runs statewide, not school-by-school. The remaining small institutions (Frostburg, Towson, USNA, UMES, Hood, and peers, ~15–30 researchers combined) come as one bundle rather than school-by-school.
Support & updates 2 years included
Two full years of monthly re-crawls, hosting, and match-quality review, so the inventory tracks faculty as they move and the matches stay sharp, instead of aging into a one-time snapshot. Included in every option above.
If this is going into the proposal, we'll draft the technology section for you: a technical narrative, a line-item budget, and this working demo to cite as preliminary work.
Narrative, line-item budget, and the landscape survey, ready to paste into the application.
The application cites a working prototype and a verified statewide survey as preliminary work.
Full UMD roster, taxonomy, production matching. Live in ~3 weeks.
Every match, introduction, and outcome logged. Your grant compliance numbers, automatic.
Who's building it
Natan Lawson runs Bike Powered Events and builds the software behind it. Across seventeen years of running his own companies he has built the systems they depend on, learning to build because the software he needed did not exist.
Julian Coy is a software engineer and community organizer in Baltimore. He builds large software systems and advises Worktree on technical architecture, code quality, and long-term maintainability. He also organizes the Code Collective community and its regional calendar, connecting Baltimore's civic tech, startup, and developer scenes.
Five decisions that shape the build
These are the calls we'd make together in the first Phase-1 working session. Answers to any of them now sharpen the scope.
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Who runs a match: the founder directly, or MEIA staff on their behalf?This demo shows the self-serve face; the staff memo is the same engine with a different front. Both ship in Phase 1. The question is which one leads.
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What should a match lead to?A warm introduction through MEIA, a cold email, an event invitation: the endpoint decides what the tool produces.
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What do we know about the entrepreneurs?If there's already an intake (accelerator applicants, cohort companies), the tool can match those companies directly from that list, rather than starting each search from scratch.
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Do researchers need to opt in?Profiles are public, but surfacing faculty for outreach may warrant a nod from tech-transfer offices. Better we raise it than a reviewer does.
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What does the grant need to count?Matches made, meetings taken, or commercialization outcomes: the success metric tells us what to instrument from day one.