Req #: 234048

Department: INSTITUTE FOR HEALTH METRICS & EVALUATION (IHME)

Job Location Detail: Office is located in Seattle; position is eligible to work fully remote within the U.S. (excluding U.S. territories)

Posting Date: 05/13/2024

Closing Info: Closes On 05/27/2024

Salary: $9,627 - $11,985 per month

Shift: First Shift

Notes: 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. (https://hr.uw.edu/benefits/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/02/benefits-professional-staff-librarians-academic-staff-20230701_a11y.pdf )

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 works to achieve our 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.

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 are 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 Research Operations team, as part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) Study. The GBD is a systematic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geography over time, and is the largest and most comprehensive effort to date to measure epidemiological levels and trends worldwide. The GBD’s aim is to provide policymakers, donors, and researchers with the highest-quality quantitative evidence base to make decisions that achieve better health. The primary purpose of the position is to provide leadership, management, and supervision within the research portfolio in order to deliver timely, high-quality, and policy-relevant results on deadline. 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. This individual will monitor, evaluate, and facilitate improvements to critical systems and processes used to align complex data and analytics. In an effort to ensure quality, consistency, and efficiency, they will create standard operating procedures for routine processes and develop new trainings and resources for use by IHME and its partners.

The Senior Research Manager will be entrusted with bringing together research and deliverables across multiple components within the portfolio. They will act as an internal knowledge expert on the complex array of interdependencies, diagnostics, and analytic processes behind the production of results using innovative scientific methods. The individual will act as a key decision-making resource. To be successful, they will need to have command of multiple research areas, including the methods and analytic machinery needs of each. They should also bring intellectual agility and deft strategic planning skills in order to properly sequence and meet interdependent deadlines and research deliverables. Overall, the Senior Research Manager will be a leader and a critical member of an agile and dynamic team, planning, guiding, implementing, managing, and monitoring a complex research enterprise.

This position is contingent on project funding availability and need, and is currently funded through at least the end of June 2026.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES Strategy and management

• Provide senior leadership to the assigned research portfolio(s) to deliver timely, high-quality, and policy-relevant results as part of an ongoing production process for key indicators central to IHME’s mission.

• Make strategic planning recommendations regarding the allocation of people, time, financial, and intellectual resources for ongoing projects and planning for new projects. Track resource use and needs across projects and make future projections.

• Develop and implement management tools and resources.

• Advise, anticipate, and negotiate scope of work and resource allocation needs and adjustments across teams throughout the production cycle as part of funding and collaborative agreements.

• Develop deep understanding of the requirements and implications for producing products alongside active research development, and facilitate communication, strategic planning, and execution across research and functional teams.

• Devise and implement systems to execute plans to accomplish the work, allocating and managing resources against production schedules. Account for the 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. 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.

• Develop best-practices, standard operating protocols, resources, and guidance for research team project managers and projects that cut across teams.

• Develop and deliver training to other team members in project management and research-specific skills.

• Assume responsibility for project-wide communication through various mechanisms, including the facilitation and/or leading of meetings.

• Facilitate governing bodies and functions for research projects.

• Cultivate positive and productive relationships across a range of team members and 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 to key actors, such as governments, donors, inter-governmental organizations, and other researchers.

• Identify and capitalize upon opportunities for resource growth, including contributing to proposals.Research command

• Agilely command the critical intellectual aspects of the research portfolio. 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 on to 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 as needed to aid in project management, publication, and proposal development.

• Ensure compliance with all federal, state, and university policies as required.Supervision

• Supervise employees, to include: hiring and training, managing workflow, priority setting, contributing to professional growth and performance development, resolving complaints, and provide course-correcting guidance when necessary.

• Mentor junior staff 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.

• Identify, develop and give trainings meant to improve employees’ technical and professional skills necessary for the research portfolio, in coordination with Organizational Development and Training team.

• Formulate and implement effective strategies for motivating teams and helping to ensure high achievement among all individuals on them.

• Contribute to leadership of those engaged in research management, including setting policies, advancing professional development, and driving new staff hiring and growth.

• Perform additional duties as assigned that fall within the reasonable scope of this position as member of the Research Operations Team. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

• Master’s degree in public health, business administration, public administration, data sciences, or related field, plus five years’ related experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.

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

• Project management experience with a range of different actors such as other managers, data professionals, researchers, and those on other functional teams such as engineers.

• Proven success and experience supervising early career professionals from diverse backgrounds, including hiring, employee development, priority setting, setting quality standards, and performance coaching.

• 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 communication 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 communicating with stakeholders at multiple levels, such as senior leaders at IHME, donors, researchers, administrators, and other external audiences.

• Excellent interpersonal skills; a cooperative team player, energetic, able to develop productive relationships.

• Proven success managing and leading dynamic teams as well as influencing and rallying diverse stakeholders against a common goal.

• 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, have strong strategic and critical thinking skills, 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: https://www.healthdata.org/about/dei. CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT

• Weekend and evening work sometimes required.

• This position is open to anyone authorized to work in the U.S.

• Office is located in Seattle, Washington. This position is eligible to work fully remote in the US., excluding US territories; work schedule required to overlap 50% of IHME office hours, between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Pacific Time.Together, our community strives to create and maintain working and learning environments that are inclusive, equitable and welcoming.The University of Washington is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer (https://hr.uw.edu/eoaa/) . To request disability accommodation in the application process, contact the Disability Services Office at 206-543-6450 / 206-543-6452 (TTY) or dso@uw.edu. Application Process: The application process 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 Work 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 access 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.

University of Washington is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, among other things, race, religion, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, sex, age, protected veteran or disabled status, or genetic information.