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An example of a two-page biosketch


A biosketch, short for biographical sketch, is a brief summary of someone's professional and educational accomplishments, publications and affiliations. Think of a biosketch as an abbreviated curriculum vitae, rarely more than three pages, which details only the most important key points and typically follows a very specific/standardized format. The word/abbreviation "biosketch" is used commonly in the scientific community and often when grants or job applications are submitted the reviewers or potential employer will explicitly ask for a biosketch of the relevant applicant(s).

BioSketch Example

An example of a biosketch is provided here: Andrew_Noske_-_Biosketch.doc

This particular example is my own biosketch (although not updated for a while). This biosketch template is very standard for anyone in the cell sciences. Notice the sections include:

  • A table with a summary of your own information and main degrees

The "publications pending" is actually something I added myself. The idea of a biosketch is to keep it short, so I would defintely remove this section if it made my biosketch over two pages.

Google Search Results - Tracking

Note that this page was *originally* created because I wanted to test how fast this page moves forwards/backwards in the list of google search results for "biosketch". Don't ask why - it's complicated! This page was created on 10/Sep/2010 and has about 20 occurrences of the word "biosketch" (including this one). It's not really doing so well actually, but that's okay. With Google each user's results is biased by their history, so only by being logged out can you (I think) see a true reflection. To check this on your own site a much better way is to use Google Webmaster Tools.

  • .. by 20/Sep/2010 (10 days), was the 185th (19th page) Google search result for "biosketch" - not as high as hoped.
  • .. by 29/Mar/2011 (5 months), is the 105th (11th page) Google search result for "biosketch" - not as high as hoped.


  • NIH's Biosketch template.pdf - the same template I used for to make my own bio-sketch.
    • the 1st Google search result for "biosketch" and this PDF has an incredibly high Google pagerank of 7! (updated: 10/Mar/2011)
  • - What is a biographical sketch - very short description of what a biographical sketch is.
    • the 2nd Google search result for "biosketch" and has a google page rank of 3. Was actually the 1st results back in 2010. (updated: 10/Mar/2011)