Director of Research Administration
About the role
The College of Engineering (COE) Office of Research Administration (ORA) provides comprehensive administrative infrastructure, regulatory governance, and strategic faculty and principal investigator support for one of the nation’s premier engineering research enterprises. Managing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual research proposals and awards, COE ORA ensures strict compliance with university, state, federal, and sponsor guidelines across an ever-changing research landscape. The College operates under a newly created Research Administration Hub (RA Hub) Operating Model. This shared-services structure combines centralized institutional oversight—such as workload balancing, standardized career progression ladders, and uniform compliance tracking—with embedded, face-to-face support tailored to the specific research portfolios of nine academic departments, three affiliated/joint academic departments across the university, specialized research centers, and extension/outreach units.
Responsibilities
The College of Engineering’s Director of Research Administration provides executive leadership, strategic direction, and operational governance across the full research lifecycle. Reporting to the Assistant Dean for Personnel and Administration & Interim Assistant Dean for College Operations, with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the Associate Dean for Research and Infrastructure, the Director leads the implementation and evolution of the College’s new Research Administration Hub Operating Model—a shared-services approach designed to strengthen and scale research administration across the College. The Director oversees a distributed network of approximately 50 research administration professionals, including Associate Directors, Hub Managers, and Sponsored Research Administrators, supporting academic departments, affiliated units, major research centers, and extension and outreach programs. In partnership with college leadership, the Director will anticipate and forecast research administration capacity and support needs as the college’s research portfolio, faculty and principal investigators, staff, and student population grow. In the role, you have the opportunity to shape how this new model operates and evolves at scale, partnering with senior College leadership to align research administration strategy, organizational capacity, workload, and risk with the College’s research priorities. Your proven leadership will help create a more consistent and scalable faculty and principal investigator experience, strengthen service delivery, improve proposal competitiveness, and position the College to effectively manage increasingly complex research portfolios with strong financial and regulatory stewardship.