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19 Jun, 2026

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How to Write an Academic CV (Template Included)

An academic CV is not a one-page resume. Here is how to structure one, what sections matter, and a complete RenderCV template to copy.

An academic CV and a resume are different documents with different rules. A resume is a one-page sales pitch tuned for a hiring manager who skims it in six seconds. An academic CV (curriculum vitae) is a complete record of your scholarly work: every publication, every grant, every course taught. It grows over a career. A senior professor's CV can run ten pages or more, and that is normal.

If you are a grad student applying for postdocs, a postdoc on the faculty market, or a professor assembling a tenure dossier, you are writing a CV, not a resume. This post covers how the two differ, what sections an academic CV needs, and gives you a complete RenderCV template you can copy and render today.

Academic CV vs. resume

The differences are structural, not cosmetic.

  • Length. A resume is capped at one or two pages. A CV has no limit. You list everything relevant, and the document is expected to expand as you publish more.
  • Publications. A resume rarely lists papers. On a CV, the publication list is often the most important section. It is read closely, and formatting conventions matter.
  • Completeness over selectivity. A resume cuts anything that does not serve the target role. A CV documents your full record: talks, posters, grants, service, teaching.
  • Audience. A resume is read by recruiters and ATS software. A CV is read by other academics on a search or tenure committee who already understand the field.

If you are moving between worlds (for example, leaving academia for industry), the conversion is real work, not a reformat. We cover that in CV vs. resume and from PhD to industry resume.

The sections an academic CV needs

Order them by what your audience cares about most. For a research position, that is education and publications near the top. The standard set:

  1. Education. Degrees, institutions, dates, advisor, dissertation title.
  2. Publications. Journal articles, conference papers, book chapters. List authors exactly as published and bold or underline your own name.
  3. Experience / Appointments. Research positions, postdocs, faculty roles.
  4. Grants and Funding. Awarded grants with amounts and your role.
  5. Awards and Honors. Fellowships, prizes, distinctions.
  6. Teaching. Courses taught, guest lectures, mentoring.
  7. Service. Reviewing, committee work, editorial roles.
  8. Talks and Presentations. Invited talks, conference presentations.

You do not need all of these, and the order shifts by career stage. A grad student leads with education and puts teaching higher; a tenure-track professor leads with publications and grants.

A complete RenderCV academic CV template

Here is a real, working YAML file. Copy it, replace the content with your own, and render it to a PDF. It validates against RenderCV's JSON Schema, so every date and section is parsed consistently.

cv:
  name: Dr. Maria Voss
  location: Cambridge, MA
  email: maria.voss@university.edu
  website: https://mariavoss.org

  sections:
    education:
      - institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
        area: Computational Neuroscience
        degree: PhD
        start_date: 2016-09
        end_date: 2021-06
        highlights:
          - "Dissertation: Predictive Coding in Cortical Microcircuits"
          - "Advisor: Prof. Daniel Hartman"
      - institution: Stanford University
        area: Physics
        degree: BS
        start_date: 2012-09
        end_date: 2016-05
        highlights:
          - "GPA: 3.9/4.0, Phi Beta Kappa"

    experience:
      - company: Harvard University
        position: Postdoctoral Research Fellow
        location: Cambridge, MA
        start_date: 2021-08
        end_date: present
        highlights:
          - Lead a project modeling synaptic plasticity in
            recurrent networks, funded by an NIH F32 fellowship.
          - Mentor three graduate students and coordinate a
            weekly computational methods seminar.
      - company: MIT
        position: Graduate Research Assistant
        location: Cambridge, MA
        start_date: 2016-09
        end_date: 2021-06
        highlights:
          - Developed open-source simulation tools for cortical
            network dynamics, now used by 40+ labs.

    publications:
      - title: Predictive coding accounts for response variability
          in visual cortex
        authors:
          - Maria Voss
          - James Okonkwo
          - Daniel Hartman
        journal: Nature Neuroscience
        date: 2023-04
        doi: 10.1038/s41593-023-01234-5
      - title: A spiking network model of hierarchical inference
        authors:
          - Maria Voss
          - Daniel Hartman
        journal: Journal of Neuroscience
        date: 2021-11
        doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0456-21.2021

    grants_and_funding:
      - name: NIH F32 Postdoctoral Fellowship
        date: 2022
        highlights:
          - "Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA, $180,000 over three years.
            Role: Principal Investigator."
      - name: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
        date: 2017
        highlights:
          - "$138,000 over three years."

    awards:
      - label: Best Dissertation Award, MIT BCS
        details: "2021"
      - label: Society for Neuroscience Travel Award
        details: "2019, 2020"

    teaching:
      - company: Harvard University
        position: Guest Lecturer, Computational Neuroscience
        start_date: 2022-09
        end_date: present
        highlights:
          - Designed and delivered four lectures on Bayesian
            models of perception for a graduate seminar.
      - company: MIT
        position: Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Neural Computation
        start_date: 2018-09
        end_date: 2020-05
        highlights:
          - Led weekly recitations and developed problem sets
            for a class of 60 undergraduates.

    service:
      - bullet: "Reviewer: Nature Neuroscience, eLife, NeurIPS"
      - bullet: Co-organizer, MIT Computational Neuroscience Journal Club
        (2019-2021)

design:
  theme: classic

A few details worth calling out:

  • Publications use the authors, title, journal, date, and doi fields. List authors in published order. To emphasize your own name, you can bold it (see below).
  • Grants go in their own section with the amount and your role spelled out. Committees read this closely.
  • Service uses simple bullet entries, which keep short one-line items clean.
  • Dates accept full YYYY-MM or just a year, so date: 2022 works fine for awards and grants.

Picking a theme

For academic CVs, two built-in themes fit best:

  • Classic : clean, traditional, single-column. It handles long publication lists and multi-page documents without looking cramped. This is the safe default for most fields.
  • Moderncv : inspired by the LaTeX moderncv package, which is widely recognized in academia. A good pick if you want the familiar LaTeX look without writing LaTeX.

Switching is one line. Change theme: classic to theme: moderncv and the same content re-typesets. The other themes (sb2nov, engineeringresumes, engineeringclassic) lean toward industry resumes, so reach for classic or moderncv here.

If you have been maintaining your CV in raw LaTeX and the recompile cycle is wearing you down, RenderCV gives you the same typographic quality from plain YAML. You write structured data, the engine handles the typesetting.

Bold your own name in publications

A common convention is to bold your name in every author list so a reader can find your contributions instantly. RenderCV does this without you editing each entry:

settings:
  bold_keywords:
    - Maria Voss

Every occurrence of Maria Voss is bolded in the rendered PDF, including inside author lists. Change the name once, regenerate, done.

Why YAML beats a Word document for a CV

An academic CV is a living document you maintain for decades. That is exactly the kind of artifact that benefits from being plain text:

  • Version control. Keep your CV in Git. Diff what changed between job cycles, branch a teaching-focused version for a liberal arts application, roll back a mistake.
  • One source of truth. Maintain a single YAML file. Generate a long-form CV, a two-page short CV, and a teaching dossier from variants of the same data.
  • Reproducible output. The same input always produces the same PDF. No font substitutions, no spacing drift between machines.
  • No manual reformatting. Add a publication by adding one entry. The layout updates itself. You never realign columns or fix bullet spacing again.

This is the same case we make for treating your resume as code, and it applies even more to a CV, because a CV is longer, lives longer, and changes more often.

Get started

Copy the template above, replace the content with your own record, and render it. You can do it from the command line:

pip install rendercv
rendercv new "Your Name"
rendercv render your_cv.yaml

Or do the whole thing in your browser at RenderCV, no install required, with the same rendering pipeline and identical output. Your academic CV deserves the same rigor you bring to your research: structured data, reproducible builds, and full control over the source.

Build your academic CV at rendercv.com

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