This one is for PhD students, postdocs, and industry researchers in New York City who want to meet other researchers outside their own lab, department, or company — without going to another 200-person mixer.
🗽 NYC has thousands of researchers, and you still don't know most of them
On paper, New York looks like the easiest city in the world to meet researchers. It isn't.
Columbia sits in Morningside Heights. NYU is downtown. CUNY is spread across five boroughs. Rockefeller is on the Upper East Side. Mount Sinai is a few blocks north of that. Weill Cornell is next door to Sinai but reports up to a different university. Icahn, Simons Foundation, Flatiron Institute, NYBG, AMNH — the map keeps going.
Each one runs its own seminars, its own happy hours, its own poster sessions. And most of the time you only meet the people already in your building. If you're a UX researcher in industry, it's worse — you might not have a natural door into the academic side at all.
So the gap isn't a shortage of researchers. It's a shortage of small, low-stakes rooms where researchers from different institutions actually sit down together.
🏛️ The Columbia–NYU–CUNY–Rockefeller–Sinai problem
New York's research scene is less a community and more a set of adjacent villages.
A computational biologist at Rockefeller and a computational biologist at Mount Sinai can be a ten-minute walk apart and never overlap for a year. A HCI PhD at Columbia and a UX researcher at a Midtown company might work on very similar questions and only find each other through a mutual friend on Twitter. A CUNY sociologist and an NYU sociologist share a subway line and two conferences a year, if that.
Part of this is scale. When your own department already has 40 PhD students, a weekly seminar, and a Slack, there isn't much extra bandwidth to go find outsiders. Part of it is geography — a "quick coffee" in NYC is a 45-minute commitment. Part of it is that the obvious cross-institution events (big conferences, city-wide symposia) are usually too large to actually meet anyone.
The upshot: cross-institution conversation in NYC tends to happen by accident. It shouldn't have to.
🥪 Why cross-institution beats another department mixer
We built RLC around cross-institution groups because the value of a lunch scales with how different the people at the table are.
Inside your own department, you already know the gossip, the funding shape, the advisors, the methods. A lunch there is nice, but the marginal information is low. Put a Columbia neuroscience postdoc next to a UX researcher at a fintech next to a CUNY political scientist next to a Sinai clinical researcher, and the conversation immediately moves to the parts of research life that people rarely compare notes on: how to structure a study, when to leave academia (or when to stay), how peer review actually works in other fields, what industry research looks like from the inside.
Small groups matter here. A table of four to six is a real conversation. A table of twenty is a series of small-talk fragments. That's the main reason we cap group size and don't run mixers.
Many postdocs also find that the most useful career conversations come from people one field over, not from within their own subfield. Someone two disciplines away can see your situation without the local politics attached.
🍽️ How RLC matches you into a monthly NYC lunch group
Here's the format, kept deliberately simple.
You apply once. You tell us what you research, where you are in your career, and roughly which part of the city is easy for you. Once a month, we match you into a small group of researchers in New York City — usually four to six people, spanning institutions and career stages. You get a time, a place, and a short intro to who else is coming. You show up. You have lunch. That's it.
No talks. No name tags. No pitch. If the group clicks, people stay in touch on their own. If not, the next month is a fresh group.
You can read more about how the lunches are matched if you want the mechanics. Everything else — vetting, logistics, dietary stuff — is covered in the common questions about how it works.
NYC is one of our densest cities, which means groups can be genuinely varied without anyone having to trek across two boroughs.
Closing
If you've been meaning to meet more researchers in New York and keep bouncing off department events that are either too big or too narrow, a monthly small-group lunch is a low-effort way to fix that. You don't need to organise anything. You just need to show up once a month.
If you're a researcher in New York City, the next round of lunches is open for sign-ups. Apply at /join.