As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem solving skills and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world.

UW faculty and staff also enjoy outstanding benefits, professional growth opportunities and unique resources in an environment noted for diversity, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits and natural beauty.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent research center at the University of Washington. Its mission is to deliver to the world timely, relevant, and scientifically valid evidence to improve health policy and practice. IHME carries out its mission through a range of projects within different research areas including: the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors; Future Health Scenarios; Costs and Cost Effectiveness; Resource Tracking; and Impact Evaluations. Our vision is to provide policymakers, donors, and researchers with the highest-quality quantitative evidence base so all people live long lives in full health.

IHME is committed to providing the evidence base necessary to help solve the world’s most important health problems. This requires creativity and innovation, which is cultivated by an inclusive, diverse, and equitable environment that respects and appreciates differences, embraces collaboration, and invites the voices of all IHME team members.

IHME has an outstanding opportunity for a Senior Research Manager on the Global Burden of Disease team (GBD). The primary purpose of the position is to provide leadership, management, and supervision within IHME’s portfolio in order to deliver timely, high-quality, and policy-relevant results on deadline as part of an ongoing production process for key health indicators. The position must bring intellectual agility, deft planning skills, and command of the intellectual content to bear in executing their responsibilities to maintain an integrated and effective production cycle that incorporates data integration, complex analyses, engineering, and dissemination. The individual designs, implements, and steers critical systems used to align complex data and analytics together for use efficiently by a highly ambitious and entrepreneurial workforce.

The Senior Research Manager provides leadership, management, and supervision in order to deliver timely, high-quality, and policy-relevant results on deadline as part of an ongoing production process for key health indicators. The Senior Research Manager will be entrusted with bringing together research and deliverables across multiple components within the GBD research portfolio. They will be an internal knowledge expert on the complex array of interdependencies, diagnostics, and analytic processes behind the production of high-quality, policy-relevant results using innovative scientific methods. The individual will act as a key decision-making resource and will lead a dynamic team of managers deep in the details of specific databases and research estimates across various components of the GBD portfolio. To be successful, they will need to have command of each of these areas, be intimately familiar with their progress and pitfalls, and bring together the research at a systems level on a sensitive timeline.

They must be able to identify problems quickly while tracking and managing progress. They are pivotal to devising and implementing solutions that keep the production process moving forward. Overall, the Senior Research Manager will be a leader and a critical member of an agile, dynamic team planning, guiding, implementing, managing, and monitoring a complex research enterprise. This position is contingent on project funding availability.

Responsibilities:

Strategy and management

• Provide senior leadership to the GBD portfolio to deliver timely, high-quality, and policy-relevant results on deadline as part of an ongoing production process for key indicators in major research areas or subcomponents of them central to IHME’s mission.
• Drive strategic planning, resource allocation, problem resolution, and team capacity building.
• Advise, anticipate, and negotiate scope of work and resource allocation needs and adjustments across teams throughout the production cycle with partners as part of funding and collaborative agreements.
• Manage resources to budgets. Make adjustments to budget and resource allocations as needed to meet enterprise-wide objectives.
• Develop deep understanding of the requirements and implications for producing products alongside active research development, and facilitate communication, strategic planning, and execution across teams of researchers and software engineers.
• Devise and implement systems to execute plans to accomplish the work, allocating and managing resources against production schedules. Take into account complexities of the work, cross-team coordination, and myriad interdependencies.
• Identify challenges and lags in the production process, raise them with leadership, and resolve them in order to maintain a timely production cycle.
• Understand, identify, and manage interdependencies across teams within and outside of the Research Management team. Be accountable for their effective management leading to on-time delivery. Give feedback and guidance to those directly managing creation of key components in the process.
• Ensure that the data integration, analyses, vetting, and dissemination of results through publications, data visualizations, and presentations meet IHME standards and are integrated appropriately into IHME’s systems.
• Identify, assess, and determine how to integrate new deliverables, enhancements, and improvements into the production process.
• Develop and deliver training to other team members in project management and research-specific skills.
• Cultivate positive and productive relationships across a range of team members and external partners to encourage candid feedback, efficient workflow, and appropriate engagement of the team with its key goals.
• Identify opportunities to engage with potential collaborators. Formulate and implement plans to increase the impact and enhance the value of the outputs of the GBD enterprise to key actors, such as governments, donors, inter-governmental organizations, and other researchers.
• Strategically balance portfolio of budgets, managing actuals against projections and making decisions about resource tradeoffs. Write manager reports as needed.
• Identify and capitalize upon opportunities for resource growth, including engaging new donors and writing proposals.

Knowledge command

• Agilely command the critical intellectual aspects of the GBD research portfolio, a major area of research central to IHME’s mission. Be able to summarize and explain results, understand the root data used to generate them, and articulate the major steps of the analyses and the related engineering components that go into them. Individual is expected to have an astute understanding of the material presented in journal articles, policy reports, and presentations that result from this research area.
• Understand how methods and analytic techniques map to specific engines and internal machinery and then onto the results and other deliverables as part of the production process.
• Translate intellectual aims into concrete analytic, engineering, and production goals with accompanying implementation plans.
• Identify need for and direct background research to aid in project management, publication, and proposal development.
• Ensure compliance with all federal, state, and university policies as required.

External engagement

• Engage directly with external audiences at scientific conferences, donor meetings, and research meetings. Present aspects of the research portfolio to others to encourage greater uptake and solicit constructive feedback.
• Initiate collaborations, exploring opportunities for programmatic growth.
• Serve as an emissary for IHME and the GBD team to government, donor, and intergovernmental communities.

Supervision

• Manage multiple professional staff and shepherd a team of both professional and research staff together with one another. Set goals, assess performance, and provide feedback and coaching.
• Mentor Researchers and Post-Bachelor Fellows by providing guidance in the development of professional skills and helping them to understand how analytic and methodological undertakings link to project deliverables.
• Contribute to team-wide priority-setting for staff.
• Motivate the overall team to achieve highly.
• Contribute to leadership of those engaged in research management, including setting policies, advancing professional development, and driving new staff hiring and growth.

Other Responsibilities

• Perform additional duties as assigned that fall within the reasonable scope of this position as a member of the Research Management Team.

As a UW employee, you will enjoy generous benefits and work/life programs. For a complete description of our benefits for this position, please visit our website, click here.

REQUIREMENTS

• Master’s degree in social sciences or related field, plus five years’ related experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.

Additional Requirements:

• Demonstrated outstanding command of the knowledge base, underlying premises, and key analytic approaches inherent to GBD.
• Project management experience with a range of different actors including other managers, data professionals, researchers, and engineers.
• Proven success managing to deadline the production of key deliverables in an ambitious, highly entrepreneurial, and swiftly evolving organizational setting.
• Analytically perceptive with a keen eye for detail and the ability to understand quickly how details relate to the big picture.
• Demonstrated proclivity for developing systems and diagnostics that can be used to help elevate management, execution, and tracking in complex research projects.
• Must exhibit strong desire and ability to learn intellectual content to facilitate highly complex scientific projects.
• Exceptional oral and written skills, in particular the ability to convey intricate and complicated intellectual material and instructions to individuals of various skills and backgrounds.
• High-level relationship management skills are critical to communicate with stakeholders at multiple levels, including donors, researchers, administrators, and other external audiences.
• Excellent interpersonal skills; a cooperative team player, energetic, able to develop productive relationships with IHME colleagues and external collaborators.
• Proven success managing and leading dynamic teams.
• Experience in one or more of the following: coordinating computational and analytic processes; designing and giving training in the social sciences; coordinating complex engineering and software development tasks; orchestrating research production delivery processes; organizing and assessing data and results on a large scale; troubleshooting complex systems.
• Incumbent must be able to work independently and must be able to take multiple priorities and translate them into project completion through expert planning.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced and collaborative environment to manage multiple priorities while coordinating resources needed to meet deadlines.

A commitment to working to alongside others at IHME to illuminate the health impacts of systemic racism and to work within IHME to make our organization more diverse and inclusive. See IHME’s DEI statement here:  http://www.healthdata.org/get-involved/careers/dei

Equivalent education/experience will substitute for all minimum qualifications except when there are legal requirements, such as a license/certification/registration.

CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT

• Weekend and evening work sometimes required.
• This position is eligible to work fully remote; work schedule required to overlap 50% of IHME office hours between 8am and 6pm Pacific Time.

Application Process:

The application process for UW positions may include completion of a variety of online assessments to obtain additional information that will be used in the evaluation process.  These assessments may include Workforce Authorization, Cover Letter and/or others.  Any assessments that you need to complete will appear on your screen as soon as you select “Apply to this position”. Once you begin an assessment, it must be completed at that time; if you do not complete the assessment you will be prompted to do so the next time you access your “My Jobs” page. If you select to take it later, it will appear on your “My Jobs” page to take when you are ready. Please note that your application will not be reviewed, and you will not be considered for this position until all required assessments have been completed.

Applicants considered for this position will be required to disclose if they are the subject of any substantiated findings or current investigations related to sexual misconduct at their current employment and past employment. Disclosure is required under Washington state law.