Program Specialist

About the role

The Program Specialist supports a wide variety of strategic initiatives that strengthen data-driven research across St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. This role involves coordinating, engaging in, and providing oversight of projects, budgets, processes, and policies essential to the success of global and departmental programs.

Responsibilities

• Support coordination of key ODS initiatives, including community programs such as event management, Special Interest Groups, and other data science-focused collaborations that engage a variety of stakeholders across the institution.
• Aid in event planning and implementation while managing project delivery elements within timelines.
• Cook up project activities across diverse teams within the Office of Data Science and with its partners across campus and beyond.
• Support the development of project charters, timelines, documentation, meeting agendas, and follow-up action items.
• Identify project dependencies and risks, and assist in mitigation planning.
• Maintain accurate project documentation and ensure timely updates to stakeholders.
• Track progress toward milestones, create and maintain documentation in platforms used by ODS, identify roadblocks, and escalate issues as needed.
• Prepare and deliver clear project status updates during ODS meetings and stakeholder check-ins.
• Facilitate clear communication between ODS and business partners to support stakeholder alignment and project progress.
• Identify inefficiencies or risks early and escalate issues appropriately to improve team operations and project outcomes.
• Assist with the development and maintenance of dashboards and reporting tools that support ODS leadership and operational oversight.
• Contribute to the preparation and completion of final project reports at project closeout.
• Document project and operational processes to support transparency, scalability, and institutional knowledge management.
• Assist in streamlining and optimizing standardized project management processes, tools, templates, workflows, and reporting mechanisms used in the ODS.
• Partner & stakeholder support: Serve as a central point of coordination between ODS teams and partners across research, clinical, and administrative areas.
• Engage internal and external stakeholders to clarify requirements, gather information, and help ensure stakeholders remain aligned and informed.
• Support meeting coordination, communication planning, and stakeholder engagement activities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree required.
• Minimum of 1+ years of experience in program coordination.
• Foundation experience in project coordination, project support, or academic/professional project management work.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to summarize information clearly and succinctly, and ask effective clarifying questions.
• Demonstrated critical thinking, adaptability, initiative, and attention to detail as outlined in St. Jude’s functional competency expectations.
• Familiarity with project management tools such as Smartsheet, Jira, or similar platforms, and documentation platforms such as Confluence.
• Experience preparing dashboards, reports, or analytics supporting decision-making.
• Project Management Certification preferred.
• Experience working in research, healthcare, scientific environments, or multinational organizations.
• Ability to create presentations, documentation, or dashboards at an executive-ready level.

Pay

In recognition of certain U.S. state and municipal pay transparency laws, St. Jude is including a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role. This is an estimate offered in good faith and a specific salary offer takes into account factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs. It is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the salary range and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current salary range is $60,320 - $105,040 per year for the role of Program Specialist.