Faculty and Members
The Institute for Advanced Study hosts about 250 visiting scholars each academic year. My office produces the annual Faculty and Members booklet, which features a full profile for each visiting scholar including a photo, top-level research topics, and a short description of current work.
The core strength of the print experience is how natural it is to skim: you can easily flip through the pages to find people whose work interests you. In fact, visiting scholars tell us the booklet helps them find potential collaborators. Facilitating this use case was my top priority for the digital edition of the publication.
The flagship feature of the digital edition is a search box that surfaces ranked results as the user types. Want to know who’s studying quantum field theory? Simply enter that phrase and the app will surface the relevant scholar profiles, with key phrases emphasized in bold.
One challenge I faced was that having 250 profiles in the DOM tended to slow down performance, particularly on mobile. I was already using the Intersection Observer API to lazily load images, so I decided to use the same API to lazily render profiles. Now the app loads fast and stays fast.
I built the site in Svelte, utilizing Fuse.js for fuzzy search and ranking.