Ask Slashdot: Finding a Research Mentor?

bsomerville writes: As an aspiring social scientist preparing to apply to Ph.D. programs, I'm keen to find a faculty mentor somewhere in North America who shares my research interests. This is more difficult than I thought it would be. While links to program websites are readily available, I'm surprised to find no comprehensive collection of faculty research interests in my field (clinical psychology). Instead this information is buried several levels down in each university website. Is this a common problem across all fields, and is there some inherent reason why no wiki-type web resource exists to meet this need? It seems like a text-searchable database could be built fairly quickly and maintained by users,saving thousands of clicks through university websites.