This is for researchers, PhDs, postdocs, and industry UX folks who want to meet other researchers but keep hitting the same dead ends. It's a plain look at where those meetings actually happen, what works online versus in person, and how to find peers beyond your own lab or team.
Where researchers actually meet (and why most options fall short)
Most of us meet other researchers in three places: our own department or team, big conferences, and the internet. Each has a ceiling.
Your own institution gives you the same twenty faces on repeat. That's fine for a while, but it's a narrow slice of your field, and even narrower if you're the only person doing your specific thing. If you're in industry, replace "department" with "research org" and the problem is identical.
Conferences are dense and useful, but they're also short, expensive, and loud. You meet ten people in a coffee break, exchange handles, and then real life resumes. The big HCI and UX fixtures on the calendar — CHI 2027 in Pittsburgh (10–14 May 2027), UIST 2027 in Detroit (2–5 November 2026), IMX, ETRA in Marrakech, and community events like CSCW and TEI — are worth going to, but they don't build a steady peer group by themselves.
And then there's the internet: Slack workspaces, Discords, subreddit threads, LinkedIn. Great for questions, weak for actual relationships.
Online vs in-person — what each is good for
Online and in-person aren't rivals. They do different jobs.
Online is good for surface area. You can find someone working on your exact niche in another country in about ten minutes. Research-specific Slack groups, methods communities, and mailing lists let you lurk, ask a question, and get a useful answer without committing to anything. The downside: it's mostly transactional. You rarely learn what someone is really like from a thread.
In-person is good for depth. A one-hour conversation over food tells you more than fifty messages. You pick up how someone thinks, what they're stuck on, what they're excited about. That's the stuff that turns into collaborations, referrals, and honest advice a year later.
The practical answer is to use both. Use online channels to find the field. Use in-person time to build the handful of relationships that actually matter.
Meeting peers outside your own institution or company
This is where most researchers get stuck. Your lab is set. Your team Slack is set. Everything outside that boundary takes effort.
A few things that genuinely work:
Go to smaller, local events, not just the flagships. Local HCI meetups, methods reading groups, city-level UX chapters, and university-hosted talks that are open to the public. The room is smaller, the conversation is longer, and you'll see the same faces again next month.
Cold email one person a month. Pick someone whose recent paper or blog post you actually read. Say what you liked, ask one specific question, keep it under six sentences. Most researchers reply.
Organise something tiny. A three-person coffee. A reading group of four. Hosting is easier than joining because you get to set the shape.
And travel with intent. If you're going to a conference, message two or three people in advance and set a time. Otherwise you'll spend the week orbiting the same hotel lobby.
A monthly small-group lunch as the low-friction default
This is the format we built Research Lunch Club around, so it's worth naming the design rationale honestly.
Monthly, because a stronger cadence burns people out and a weaker one doesn't build familiarity. Small groups (four to six), because that's the largest table where one conversation still happens instead of splitting into pairs. Lunch, because it has a natural end time and doesn't demand an evening. Mixed backgrounds within a research umbrella, because talking only to people in your exact subfield is what got you here.
RLC matches researchers in the same city into those groups. You get a group, a restaurant, and a date. You show up. That's the whole loop. You can read how the lunches are matched or check the cities we run in if you want the specifics.
Many postdocs and industry researchers find that a recurring low-stakes format works better than sporadic big events, simply because it removes the planning tax. You don't have to organise anything. You just have to eat lunch.
Meeting other researchers isn't one big move. It's a habit of small ones: cold emails, local meetups, one conference a year, and something regular that keeps you in a room with peers who aren't your coworkers. If you're a researcher, the next round of lunches is open for sign-ups. Apply at /join.