Director of Research at BURN

BURN is looking for a Director of Research whose overall responsibility will be to lead BURN’s long-term research department. The DoR will lead a team that will pursue, write and administrate grants (mostly responding to RFPs/solicitations), to support 3 key areas:

1. R&D for new technologies
2. Pilots/field studies to test innovative new products and services
3. Expansion into new markets

The DoR, in 2020, will build and supervise a 4-person team that will include a Grant Writer, Grant Administrator, and two Project Managers. This team will liaise with Burn’s existing Design & Engineering, Market Intelligence, and Expansion teams to fulfill items 1 – 3 listed above.

BURN currently raises over $1 million in grant funding and we expect the DOR to grow this to ~$2 million in 2020.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Responsible for identifying and writing grants that are well aligned with BURN’s mission, vision, and capacity.
• Responsible for building and managing their team
• Ensure that all projects are sufficiently and appropriately resourced and that our recommended project management and analysis approaches are being adhered to.
• To monitor on a day-to-day basis, resources for live projects, supplementing/modifying teams as required, and generally acting in the role of troubleshooter to ensure the smooth progress of all projects.
• To take an overview of the management of all live projects, ensuring that relevant meetings take place - initiation, mid-project update, product handling, field, data processing, and data analysis briefings, debrief planning and postmortems. This will involve direct liaison with each department and key personnel across the relevant departments.
• To scrutinize proposed timings for projects and discuss them with the key departments to ensure that projects’ needs are met.
• To keep abreast of outstanding proposals to foresee and plan workload levels.

Desired experience:

• 5 years’ experience in managing grant-funded or similar programs
• Research management
• Grant writing
• Grant administration
• Project management
• Thrive in a fast-paced creative environment with a culture of experimentation yet value the need to organize and plan
• Excellent communication skills – unafraid to speak up or take issues head-on
• A technical background is preferred
• The successful candidate will, in the long run, manage these teams but must have practical experience in each category to ensure a running start. A technical background would be helpful, or at least someone who's engaged with a technical team before.