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Senior Director - Research Project Leader

Employer
GSK
Location
Collegeville, Pennsylvania
Salary
Competitive
Closing date
Aug 26, 2022

View more

Discipline
Other, Other
Job Type
President/CEO/Director/VP, Research Scientist
Organization Type
All Industry, Pharma
Are you a strategic, collaborative and visionary leader looking to drive discovery projects to key inflection points, including selection of a clinical candidate?

We're seeking experienced Project Leaders to join the team on a permanent, full-time basis. Project Leaders within the Research Project Leader Centre of Excellence are dedicated to the end-to-end leadership of projects spanning the entire drug discovery process, from target validation through to the nomination of clinical candidates.

The Research Project Leader (PL) is the single point of accountability to strategically lead the discovery of a clinical candidate from target validation through to commit to candidate selection. This is a decision-making position with high visibility and direct interaction with senior leaders. You will lead a multidisciplinary team which will define, implement, and oversee the discovery strategy for an asset. Collaboration and influence are critical to this position as you will be working with various stakeholders across R&D, obtaining and managing resources, and delivering evidence to support candidate discovery and go/no-go decisions. The PL is accountable for leading and driving teams to perform to their best. You will use your drug discovery and development experience to develop the medicine profile drawing from your scientific, development, and business knowledge or experience.

This role will provide you the opportunity to lead key activities to progress your career, these responsibilities include some of the following

Project Leadership - Develop a medicine vision and value proposition for the program

  • Partner with subject matter experts to develop a plan to deliver on the medicine vision
  • Lead the team to identify core risks to the delivery of the molecule and path to the medicine itself and putting into place plans to mitigate these risks
  • Understanding next steps for the project and proactively engaging appropriate subject-matter experts to plan and execute
  • Responsible for establishing the decision / inflection points that enable data driven project decision-making
  • Define and execute the target validation, lead identification and lead optimization strategies for your projects
  • Able to reconcile data; at time with conflicting data, to make informed recommendations


Matrix Leadership - Build and nurture high performing project teams
  • Lead and inspire, be curious and strategic, and clearly communicate to the team and senior leaders
  • Drive urgency across your teams to deliver timely data-driven project recommendations
  • Identify and proactively address diminishers of team performance


Portfolio Context - Understand the strategic positioning of the program to the internal portfolio and competitor landscape

  • Communicate the project value proposition relative to the GSK portfolio and competitive landscape
  • Recommend when GSK should continue to invest in the medicine vision, recommend when to accelerate and when to terminate projects in the portfolio
  • Solicit engagement from the internal and external scientific community, engage in robust dialogue that generates insight and advances scientific understanding of your projects


Why you?

Basic Qualifications

We are looking for professionals with these required skills to achieve our goals:
  • PhD, MD, MSc, or BSc in a scientific discipline of relevance to drug discovery
  • 15+ years of drug discovery experience
  • Project leadership experience with delivering clinical candidates or justified terminations across multiple therapeutic areas and potentially multiple modalities
  • A demonstrable track record of developing and delivering successful outcomes through a diverse team
  • A demonstrable ability to influence without authority in a highly matrixed environment


Preferred Qualifications

If you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus:
  • Multiple project leader roles are advertised that support GSK Research, therefore, drug discovery expertise in one or more of these areas is preferred: oncology (synthetic lethality, immune modulators), neuroscience, cardiovascular, renal, metabolic diseases, antibacterial agents, and cellular & molecular immunology.
  • Proven ability to think and plan strategically, to lead and work with members of other functions within a matrix environment.
  • Familiarity with modality selection and screening strategies for discovery projects.
  • Ability to integrate and lead a team of multi-discipline experts including biology, chemistry, safety assessment, computational sciences, clinical scientists, translational scientists, and others.
  • Ability to align resources (people and financial), team objectives and strategies behind the vision; ensures resource gaps are identified and where possible, filled or managed.
  • Create and lead an empowered, motivated team where diversity of thought is encouraged.
  • Able to engage and leverage internal and external networks to drive performance and results.
  • First-hand experience of all phases of early drug discovery from target validation to candidate selection.
  • Understands the entirety of R&D across discovery and development.
  • Experience with multiple drug modalities, primarily small molecules and biologics
  • Previous leadership of project(s) that have delivered candidates for clinical progression
  • Experience leading multiple projects concurrently


Why GSK?

We're uniting science, technology and talent to make a difference in more people's lives, and revolutionising the way we do R&D.

We're combining the power of genetic and genomic insights into what causes disease, with the speed and scale of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to make better predictions about who a treatment might work for, and why. We believe this powerful combination of data and technology holds the key to fundamentally transforming medical discovery for the better, improving R&D success rates and shaping how even the most challenging diseases, like neurological conditions and cancer, can be both prevented and treated.

*This is a job description to aide in the job posting, but does not include all job evaluation details.

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