Director, Integrated Tufts University and Tufts Medicine Research Enterprise

An invitation to apply for the position of Director

Integrated Tufts University and Tufts Medicine Research Enterprise

Boston, Massachusetts

Tufts University and Tufts University School of Medicine have joined with the health system Tufts Medicine to integrate their scholarly research into a single research enterprise. They seek a founding director, with scientific distinction, managerial experience, and a classic entrepreneur’s vision and agility, who can create an innovative enterprise that supports groundbreaking research, in the heart of Boston’s ecology of biomedical science.

Historically, each entity has invested modestly and episodically in research, driven by individual principal investigators. Tufts University School of Medicine and Tufts Medicine currently host roughly $50 million each in annual research expenditures. The university is committed to dramatically growing research, especially sponsored research, with investment and new hires, and this new integrated research enterprise is an anchor to their strategy.

The director will report to the dean of the medical school, who is also the chief academic officer of the health system and who chairs a board for the research enterprise of 11, equally composed from both institutions. The director will be charged with finalizing the vision and determining a course of action for the integrated research enterprise. The enterprise will require a strong, scientific staff, able to target the right, large research funding opportunities, to draw faculty together, across many divides, and to staff and support the development of winning proposals.

The director must build a worthy enterprise from a modest base. It will require partnerships, in the health system and the medical school, with engineering, with particular faculty in arts and sciences, with the health sciences schools, and with industry and research groups throughout the greater Boston metropolitan area.  This is an entrepreneur’s job, for someone who understands how to build trust, target opportunity, manage change, and leverage committed investments to enable dramatic growth. The director will have the strong support of all the leadership in all the Tufts-related entities, especially from the dean/chief academic officer, who can act for both institutions, but the leaders will look to the director as their champion for this essential mission.   

Tufts has retained the national executive search firm Isaacson, Miller to assist in this search. All applications, nominations, and inquiries should be sent in confidence to:

https://www.imsearch.com/8871

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