Scientific Project Director Cancer Neuroscience

Job Functions

• Plans, develops, manages, and implements scientific and financial planning of long and short-term goals, deliverables and milestones for CNP projects.
• Conducts ongoing project analysis and evaluates resources, outcomes, and barriers to scientific progress. Identifies risks; recommends and implements mitigation strategies.
• Serves as central coordination point across project teams, co-investigators, other faculty/collaborators, staff, Philanthropy, external partners, and others as needed.
• Drives structured project interactions including agenda setting, discussion facilitation, follow-up on action items, and managing timelines from project deliverables and other ad hoc reporting.
• Plans, coordinates, and implements all needed actions to maintain a seminar series including identifying and inviting speakers, ensuring timely and constant follow-through, coordinating travel as needed, and ensuring invites to institutional stakeholders is done in a timely and efficient manner.
• Ensures clear, prompt, and timely communication between scientific, operational, and leadership stakeholders.
• Manages and maintains centralized project documentation, source materials, and project templates; updates documentation to reflect evolving strategic plans and operational needs.
• Implements standardized processes, reporting structures, and operational best practices that support project transparency and performance tracking.
• Serves as the primary liaison between the Director, Research Planning & Development and each individually CNP-funded principal investigator; maintains regular structured touchpoints with each PI to monitor scientific progress, surface emerging needs or barriers, and relay relevant programmatic updates, ensuring that the Director maintains informed, timely visibility into the status of all funded projects without requiring direct PI contact for routine matters.
• Develops and maintains a systematic ROI tracking framework for all CNP-funded projects capturing metrics such as publications, subsequent grant funding, intellectual property disclosures, patent application filings, clinical translation milestones, and philanthropic leverage attributable to CNP investment; produces regular ROI reports for program leadership and philanthropic stakeholders, and continues monitoring return on investment for a defined period.

Qualifications

• Master's Degree
• Preferred: PhD in Biological Science or related field
• Required: Six years of experience in biotechnology/pharmaceutical/academic research or clinical research setting to include three years of research program/project management experience. Preferred: Four years experience with preferred degree.
• Strong expertise across basic, translational, and clinical research
• Excellent cross-functional coordination, financial and resource stewardship, risk mitigation, and milestone-based progress for complex, multi-investigator discovery initiatives
• Effective communication with multiple principal investigators and stakeholders
• Highly organized, solutions-oriented, and innovative with the ability to independently identify opportunities and propose strategies
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Experience with budgets and philanthropy or donor-funded projects (a plus)