JOB TITLE: External Collaborations Project Manager
Comprising diverse researchers from a variety of disciplines across academic divisions, the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute leads UC Santa Cruz's efforts to unlock the world's genomic data and accelerate breakthroughs in health and evolutionary biology. Our platforms, technologies, and scientists unite global communities to create and deploy data-driven, life-saving treatments and innovative environmental and conservation efforts while addressing the most fundamental societal and policy questions.
The Computational Genomics Platform (CGP) team uses big data technologies to facilitate genomic research for global health issues such as breast cancer and other genetic risk factors. The team collaborates with many universities and institutes around the world. Examples of projects include supporting a global team to create the Human Cell Atlas, a compendium that maps gene activity in each cell in the human body, and the National Health Institute Data Commons project, which is about developing the technology to share and combine controlled access to genomic data across different institutes.
This role requires skills as a seasoned, experienced technical project management professional with a full understanding of project management frameworks and methods, relevant policies and procedures to resolve a wide range of issues. Demonstrates competency in selecting methods and techniques to obtain solutions. Manages projects of diverse scope, size, impact, budget and/or project team size. This project manager will work with the product managers to coordinate reports and deliverables for a variety of grants. The incumbent is conversant in management techniques like Scrum and tools like Jira or Asana. The candidate collects and tracks tasks and deliverables from a variety of sources and ensures that any work required from a product team is clearly communicated. The candidate works primarily with product managers from multiple internal and external teams to achieve overall grant goals. They will travel frequently to facilitate cross-team collaboration and they will track many phone conference calls for important details and updates regarding projects. The teams involved in product development work together to build large-scale genomic compute environments.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in related area and/or equivalent experience/training.
- Experience coordinating and/or managing projects.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively orally and in writing, with the ability to synthesize many details into actionable items.
- Demonstrated knowledge of project management principles, theories, and concepts.
- Experience facilitating meetings.
- Experience setting and meeting deadlines.
- Demonstrated effective organization and project management skills.
- Demonstrated capacity to anticipate obstacles and plan for contingencies.
- Demonstrated attention to detail. Demonstrated ability to determine relevance and prioritize tasks.
- Experience tracking information streams from a variety of sources and synthesizing the information.
- Ability to calmly negotiate and resolve differences and misunderstandings between groups.
Preferred Qualifications
- Demonstrated ability to assess project needs for software tools and make plans to meet those needs.
- Demonstrated working knowledge of bioinformatics tools or big data management.
- Demonstrated broad knowledge of many aspects of software development cycle and communications.
Professional certification preferred.
Duties
70% - Applying professional project management and IT concepts, works with both local and external product managers to track division of labor and integration of team deliverables. Maintains a JIRA-like tracking system with timelines and tracking boards for principal investigators (PI) and collaborators to clearly understand the progress toward deliverables. Leads weekly team meetings for engineers, PIs, and product managers to facilitate their collaboration. Prepares agendas for these meetings and facilitates related calls as necessary. Organizes project activities with the goal of completing the project on schedule and within budget constraints.
- 20% - Tracks information streams from a variety of sources and synthesizes the information for project team members. Attends frequent conference calls to report on activity or to collect instructions from funding agencies on deliverables. Frequently travels to conferences and face-to-face meetings with external collaborators.
- 10% - Assists with project proposals and prepares monthly and quarterly progress reports.
Salary
Starting Salary Range: $5,834-$7,084/monthly. Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.
