Postdoc CV: Structure, Template and Example [2026]

The CV that won you a doctoral place will not win you a postdoc, and the reason is narrower than most guides admit. A PhD application is assessed on potential. A postdoctoral application is assessed on evidence, and specifically on evidence that you can produce work without someone else setting the direction.

Everything below is about making that evidence findable.

What the panel is actually deciding

For most postdoctoral posts, a shortlisting panel is answering three questions:

1. Can this person do the methods we need? Answered by your technical section and the methods visible in your papers.
2. Do they finish things? Answered by your publication list, and specifically by whether first-author work exists.
3. Can they work without supervision? Answered by funding, independent projects, collaborations you initiated, and anyone you have supervised.

The third question is the one doctoral CVs are worst at. A thesis demonstrates persistence, not independence. If your CV has nothing that you started, nothing you brought money in for, and nobody you trained, the panel has no evidence on their most important question.

Structure

Publications move up. That is the main structural difference from a doctoral CV.

1. Name and contact details
2. Research summary, three or four lines: the question, the methods, the systems
3. Research positions, current first
4. Education, with thesis title and supervisor
5. Publications, peer-reviewed and numbered, own name bold
6. Preprints and work under review, clearly separated
7. Funding, fellowships and awards, with your role stated
8. Conference talks and posters, presented only
9. Teaching and supervision
10. Service: reviewing, committees, organising
11. Technical skills
12. Referees

Education sitting below your positions can feel wrong the first time you do it. It is correct: by this stage the panel cares more about what you have been employed to do than where you trained, and your thesis is still visible under education for anyone checking.

The independence signals worth surfacing

These are the lines that change how a postdoc CV reads. Each one is a fact you probably already have and may not be stating.

• Any grant, however small. A 900 GBP travel award means you wrote an application and it was assessed. Give funder, scheme, amount, dates, role.
• A project you proposed. If a strand of work was your idea rather than assigned, say so: "proposed and led the reanalysis that became [paper]".
• Students you supervised. Master's students, summer students, rotation students. Name the level and whether they completed.
• Collaborations you initiated. A paper with a group you approached yourself is different from one your PI arranged, and it is worth a parenthetical.
• Infrastructure you own. Maintaining a shared rig, a pipeline, or a cluster workflow used by other people is a real contribution and reads as reliability.
• Reviewing. Being asked to review is evidence that the field recognises you.

Publications: what a panel checks

They check three things quickly: whether first-author papers exist, whether the venues are ones they recognise, and whether the list is honest about status.

Keep peer-reviewed work in its own numbered list. Put preprints, submissions, and manuscripts in preparation in a separate labelled block. A panel that finds a "submitted" paper mixed into your peer-reviewed list will discount the whole list, which is a heavy price for one ambiguous line.

Bold your own name in every author string, and where the author list is long, add a short note on what you did. "Wei C., Berger M., Osei K. (2026), Nature Machine Intelligence (led the analysis)" answers a question the citation alone leaves open.

Maintaining that list by hand is the part people put off, and it is where the errors accumulate. Pasting a DOI, PubMed, or arXiv link into a publication entry in the academic CV builder fills the title, authors, date, and source from the publisher's record, so what appears on your CV matches what is indexed.

A worked example

A computational biology postdoc, three years post-submission, applying for a second postdoc with a view to fellowship applications:

Research summary. Machine learning for protein structure, with a focus on affinity prediction. Methods: geometric deep learning, molecular dynamics.

Research positions. Postdoctoral Research Associate, Imperial College London, 2024 to present. Lead a fellowship-funded project on protein-ligand affinity prediction; two papers accepted in year one. Supervise two PhD students. Maintain the group's GPU cluster workflows, used by fourteen researchers.

Education. PhD Computer Science, ETH Zurich, 2020 to 2024. Thesis: geometric deep learning for molecular structure prediction. Supervisor: Prof. M. Berger.

Publications. Eleven peer-reviewed, numbered, newest first, four of them first-author. Two further manuscripts under review, listed separately with journals named.

Funding. EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2024. Two conference travel awards, 2022 and 2023.

Teaching and supervision. Two PhD students co-supervised. One master's cohort of six. Guest lectures on a machine learning module.

Service. Reviewer for ICLR and NeurIPS. Co-organised one workshop.

That record fits on four pages. The independence evidence is in three separate places: the fellowship under funding, the supervision under teaching, and the cluster workflows under the current post. A panel gets its answer without having to infer anything.

How this differs by field

The structure holds across disciplines. What counts as evidence varies a lot.

In wet lab work, techniques are the currency. List them specifically enough that a PI can tell whether you could walk into their lab tomorrow: not "molecular biology" but the assays, the model organisms, the instruments you have actually run. Licences belong there too, animal handling certification included.

Computational and theoretical fields treat code as an output, and they are right to. A maintained repository that other people use is closer to a paper than to a hobby, so give it a line of its own with what it does and who uses it. Preprints also carry more weight here than in lab fields, which makes it worth stating where each one stands.

Humanities posts are fewer and usually tied to a named project, so alignment with that project matters more than breadth. Monographs under contract, edited volumes, translations, and critical editions are all outputs. Languages get their own section rather than being buried under skills.

Clinical researchers have a category the other fields do not: trial involvement, protocol authorship, guideline contributions, and ethics approvals you personally secured. Those are often more persuasive to a panel than paper count alone.

One publication entry, rewritten

A weak entry gives a panel work to do:

Smith et al. (2025). Paper about binding site prediction. Bioinformatics.

A strong one answers the questions the panel was going to ask anyway:

Wei, C., Lindqvist, A., Berger, M. (2025). Benchmarking equivariant networks on binding-site prediction. Bioinformatics, 41(3). (first author; designed benchmark and wrote the paper)

Your name is findable, the position is unambiguous, the venue is visible, and the contribution is stated. None of that is self-promotion. It removes guesswork from a document someone will read in under three minutes.

Career breaks and gaps

Panels see gaps constantly and most have had one. What damages an application is an unexplained hole, not the break itself.

Give the dates and a short factual label: parental leave, caring responsibilities, illness, visa delay, military service. One line, no apology, no elaboration. UK funders increasingly ask assessors to consider career breaks explicitly, and several schemes extend eligibility windows to account for them, so the information often works in your favour rather than against it.

If a break affected how much you published, the cover letter is where to say so. Keep the CV to the dates.

How long, and what about page two

Three to five pages is normal for a postdoctoral CV. There is no penalty for length if the structure holds, and no reward for compressing an eleven-paper record onto two pages.

What does matter is that pages two onwards still work as a document. Running headers with your name and a page number mean a printed CV that gets separated can be put back together, which is a small thing until it happens to yours.

Referees, and when to approach them

Most UK postdoctoral applications ask for referees up front rather than after interview, and the choice itself gets assessed.

Your doctoral supervisor is expected. Leaving them off invites the question of why. If the relationship ended badly, include them anyway and add a second person who can speak to the same period.

Reach outside your group where you can. Two references from the same lab tell a panel one perspective twice. A collaborator at another institution, or someone who examined your thesis, is worth more.

Ask before you list, and give them the advert, your CV, and a note on which criteria you would like addressed. A referee who has to reconstruct your record from memory writes a weaker letter than one who has the person specification in front of them.

Fellowship applications are a different document

If you are applying for a fellowship rather than a post, read the call before reusing this structure. Fellowship schemes routinely impose a two-page CV limit, prescribe section order, or ask for a narrative CV instead, where you describe contributions in prose under set headings rather than listing outputs. The Royal Society and Wellcome have both moved in that direction.

When a call prescribes a format, the call wins. Keep your full CV as the source and cut down from it.

If the record is still thin

Plenty of people apply for a first postdoc with one paper, no grants, and nobody supervised. That is normal and it is not fatal. What sinks those applications is padding rather than the record itself.

What helps is detail on what you actually have. One first-author paper with your contribution stated is stronger than three lines implying more. Foreground methods too, because a PI hiring for a technique cares more that you can run it than that you have published with it. And use the cover letter for the trajectory: what is under review, what is in preparation with a target journal named, what you would want to start on in month one.

What does not help is inflating a poster into a talk, a departmental seminar into a conference presentation, or attendance into participation. Panels check, and a single overstated line makes them reread the whole document sceptically.

Mistakes that cost shortlisting

No first-author work flagged. If you have it, make it impossible to miss. If you do not, foreground what you do have rather than hoping the panel does not check.

Funding buried at the bottom. For any post that expects future grant income, funding belongs above teaching.

Attendance listed as presentation. Separate talks and posters you delivered from conferences you attended.

A skills section of adjectives. Name methods, instruments, languages, and software. Nothing else belongs there.

Recycling the doctoral CV unchanged. The clearest tell is education still sitting above research positions with no funding section at all.

Moving abroad

For posts elsewhere in Europe, this structure travels, with two changes: some institutions expect a photo and date of birth, and several public-sector and EU institutional schemes ask for the standard EU format, which carries its own header and a language self-assessment grid. That format is covered on the Europass CV page.

For the terminology difference between an academic CV and a resume, see CV vs resume. For doctoral applications rather than postdoctoral ones, the structure differs enough to be worth reading separately in academic CV for PhD applications.

Frequently asked questions

How many publications do I need for a postdoc?

There is no threshold, and it varies by field: one first-author paper in a slow-moving discipline can outweigh five middle-author papers in a fast one. What matters is that the list is honest and that first-author work is visible if it exists.

Should education go above or below my research positions?

Below, once you hold a research post. The panel is assessing what you have been employed to produce. Your thesis stays visible under education.

Do I list my PhD supervisor?

Yes, alongside the thesis title, for anything within a few years of submission. Panels use it to place your training and often know the person.

How do I show independence if I have no funding yet?

Through what you initiated: a project strand you proposed, a collaboration you set up, students you trained, or infrastructure you own. State these as facts rather than describing yourself as independent.

Is a two-page postdoc CV ever right?

Only when the call asks for one. Some fellowship schemes do, and then two pages is the requirement rather than a compromise.