I think the poster had originally envisioned some sort of registration service, although automatic linking of semantic info from authored papers would be helpful. Personally, I am just finding people in the sociology department who are working in the same area I work in over in the psychology department.

I think integrating with ResearchGate would be more effective, Scival seems bureaucratic...

Our unit was contacted by the Office of Research because they are considering a campus wide purchase of http://www.info.scival.com/what-is-scival for this purpose.

I am wondering how the original poster envisioned this idea would work. What level of specificity would be useful? Are you just trying to obtain a list of researchers working in a fairly high level "large problem space"? Are you trying to get specific details about researchers tied to funding source? Do you want a text mining service that is crawling and indexing all of the papers being written by researchers at UW? There are a lot of ways to tackle the question described and I wouldn't begin to know how to crack this nut without some more detailed use cases.