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Why This Site Exists: O-1 Evidence Hub

2026-04-26

Meta

The site is a personal portfolio, but it is also a deliberately built canonical evidence hub for an O-1 extraordinary-ability visa application.

This site is a personal portfolio. It is also, deliberately, an evidence hub.

What an O-1 actually evaluates

The O-1 "extraordinary ability" visa requires showing sustained acclaim in a field. USCIS evaluates evidence across categories — published material, original contributions of major significance, scholarly articles, leadership roles, high remuneration. Adjudicators read whatever they can find on the web about the applicant.

Why the canonical hub matters

If the only thing returnable for "Arkash Jain" is a LinkedIn profile and a stale GitHub README, the adjudicator reconstructs you from fragments. If there's a single canonical site that links every public proof point — papers, code, interviews, citations — they don't have to.

How this site is structured for that

  • Person JSON-LD on every page tells search engines who I am, where I work, what I've published, and which external profiles are mine.
  • /research lists every published paper with ScholarlyArticle JSON-LD and direct links to BioArxiv / Journal of Cell Biology / Journal of Chemical Physics.
  • /about is the life changelog — every milestone with date and category, in chronological order.
  • /work documents internal tooling I've built (Foundry CLI, RTK, skills).
  • <link rel="me"> declarations on every page tie this site to LinkedIn, GitHub, Substack, BioArxiv profiles.

The honest version

I'm building this for the visa, but I'd build something like it anyway. Forcing yourself to canonicalize what you've done is a useful exercise even when no adjudicator is reading.