Stellanet

Stellanet is an AI-assisted research outreach platform that helps students find relevant faculty and prepare higher-quality first-contact emails.

The product combines grounded discovery, transparent match reasoning, and controllable draft rewriting in a single workflow.

Core Features

• Discover professor candidates from real publication and affiliation signals.
• Rank matches based on user research interest and profile context.
• Show trust details such as why-match bullets, score breakdowns, and recent paper snippets.
• Provide contact email signals when available (direct, inferred, or unavailable).
• Generate outreach drafts and rewrite by tone while keeping human review in control.
• Support authentication flows including signup/signin, email verification, and password reset.
• Support Google OAuth sign-in.

Product Workflow

1. Set your interest, profile, and target universities.
2. Review ranked faculty matches with reasoning signals.
3. Generate and refine draft outreach.
4. Send only after manual review.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: React, Vite, Tailwind CSS
• Backend: FastAPI, Python
• Model layer: Amazon Nova (Bedrock)
• Research data source: OpenAlex
• Auth and session store: SQLite (local) or PostgreSQL (production)
• Deployments: Vercel (frontend), AWS App Runner (backend)

Repository Structure

• frontend/Stellanet - frontend application
• backend - API, retrieval, ranking, rewrite, auth, and mailer logic

Local Development

1) Create local environment files

cp backend/.env.example backend/.env
cp frontend/Stellanet/.env.example frontend/Stellanet/.env

2) Run backend

cd backend
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn main:app --reload --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

3) Run frontend

cd frontend/Stellanet
npm install
npm run dev -- --host 127.0.0.1 --port 5173

Required Environment Notes

• Set VITE_API_BASE_URL in frontend env to your backend base URL.
• Set Bedrock credentials and model env vars in backend env for Nova-powered generation.
• Set OPENALEX_MAILTO for OpenAlex requests.
• For contact form delivery, set CONTACT_TO_EMAIL and either Resend or SMTP env vars.
• For Google sign-in, set frontend VITE_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID and backend GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_IDS.

Roadmap

• Improve ranking calibration and confidence transparency.
• Add saved workspaces and outreach history.
• Add stronger observability and automated quality checks.
• Expand personalization controls for draft generation and rewriting.