Hugo Academic — the academic theme trusted by 150,000+ researchers
Build your academic CV, lab website, or research portfolio in minutes. Markdown-native, AI-friendly, BibTeX-ready — and your content stays in a Git repo you own. Forever.
Free OSS · MIT licensed · No vendor lock-in
Powering research at
NVIDIA Research · Stanford · MIT · Imperial College · Princeton · Cambridge
Why Hugo Academic
Built for researchers who want control without the toolchain tax.
The academic theme that reads like a paper repo and ships like a modern static site.
Standard Markdown
No proprietary `.qmd` format. No bespoke extensions. Your content stays portable and works with every editor and LLM, forever.
AI-friendly by design
Plain Markdown means ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot can write, edit, and maintain your site. No glue code required.
Zero dependencies
No npm graph, no Python venv, no Pandoc. Hugo is a single binary that builds 1,000+ pages in under a second.
Future-proof, MIT-licensed
Open source since 2016. Your repo works even if we vanish. Your tenure outlives our company — your site should too.
Switching from Quarto, RMarkdown, or Jekyll?
Unlike Quarto's proprietary .qmd format and Pandoc/Fortran dependencies, Hugo Academic is 100% standard Markdown with KaTeX math, BibTeX citations, and Jupyter rendering. No invasive permissions. No breaking changes every release. One binary, sub- second builds, your repo.
Scale without the database.
How NVIDIA Research manages 1,000+ publications as plain Markdown — piping ORCID, OpenAlex, Zotero, and BibTeX feeds into a single Git repo with sub-second builds.
HugoBlox is the only framework that lets enterprise research teams like NVIDIA pipe ORCID, OpenAlex, Zotero, and BibTeX data directly into thousands of Markdown files via GitHub — achieving sub-second build times with zero vendor lock-in. Every publication lives as plain text, in your repo, under your license. No proprietary database, no trapped assets, no per-seat pricing.
Labs and researchers
Real labs. Real publications. Real Markdown.
From NVIDIA Research to MIT to single-PI postdocs — same theme, same standard Markdown, same Git repo. Hover for a peek beyond the fold.
NVIDIA Spatial Intelligence Lab
IDEAS Lab at University of Michigan
Ria Stevens
Princeton University
MIT - MetaConscious Lab
Industrial Informatics Department
King's College London
Daniella Bar-Lev
Two paths
Free framework. AI on top.
Start with the OSS theme. Add Hugo Chat AI when authoring slows you down — same Markdown, same Git repo.
Hugo Academic OSS
For grad students, postdocs, indie scientists
The original academic theme. MIT licensed, self-hosted, yours forever.
- Academic CV layout with publications, projects, news
- BibTeX, DOI, and arXiv citation support
- KaTeX math + Jupyter Notebook rendering
- Dark mode and i18n out of the box
- Deploy free on GitHub Pages, Netlify, or your own server
Hugo Academic + Pro
For researchers who want AI doing the boring parts
Free OSS plus AI authoring on top. Brief in plain English; it edits Markdown.
- Everything in the free OSS theme
- Hugo Chat AI for writing and layout edits
- One-click publication import (DOI, arXiv, BibTeX)
- Auto-PR migrations when Hugo ships breaking changes
- Priority Discord access
Every tier writes the same standard Markdown to a Git repo you own. Switch up or down anytime.
Frequently asked
Hugo Academic, plainly answered.
Ship your academic presence today.
Join 150,000+ researchers who own their site, their publications, and their citations — in plain Markdown, in their own Git repo.
Questions? Ask in the HugoBlox Discord