Program Manager, Open Science

Job Description

Founded by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a new kind of philanthropy that’s leveraging technology to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges – from eradicating disease, to improving education. Across our core initiatives of Science and Education, we’re pairing engineering with grantmaking, impact investing, policy work, and advocacy, to progress in our mission of building an inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.

Our Values

We believe we can help build a future for everyone.

• We aim to be daring, but humble: We look for bold ideas — regardless of structure and stage — and help them scale by pairing engineers with subject matter experts to build tools that accelerate the pace of social progress.
• We want to learn fast, but build for the long-term: We want to iterate fast and help bring new solutions to the table, but we also realize that important breakthroughs often take decades, or even centuries.
• Stay close to the real problems: We engage directly in the communities we serve because no one understands our society’s challenges like those who live them every day.

Our success is dependent on building teams that include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can challenge each other's assumptions with fresh perspectives. To that end, we look for a diverse pool of applicants including those from historically marginalized groups — women, people with disabilities, people of color, formerly incarcerated people, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or gender nonconforming, first and second generation immigrants, veterans, and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

CZI also supports multiple work options. Learn more about our philosophy and approach here .

The Opportunity

The Science Initiative at CZI supports science and technology that will help make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Our support takes many forms: grantmaking, collaborating directly with researchers, developing technology and tools, and building support for scientific research.

Our vision with CZI’s Open Science program is the universal and immediate open sharing of all scientific knowledge, processes, and outputs. Over the next 10 years, we aim to support a diverse scientific community working in the open to accelerate our understanding of human health and disease. We invest in tools, platforms, and organizations that help expand participation and access to the scientific process by making it open and reproducible, and helping scientists build on each others’ work. The program is structured with five initiatives:

1. Tools and resources for research : Support tools that provide easy ways for engagement and reproducibility in research. Support maintainers and creators of these tools to ensure sustainability and ongoing access.
2. Education and capacity building : Increase awareness about the benefits of open science, existing tools, and best practices for open science. Ensure researchers are trained to effectively engage in open science and computational reproducibility.
3. Metrics and incentives : Support tools and infrastructure that help shift incentives toward open science practices, especially by enabling the tracking of open outputs.
4. Sharing platforms : Support platforms that provide mechanisms for accessing and sharing research processes and outputs easily, as early as possible in the research cycle.
5. Improved infrastructure technology and integration : Fund and incentivize improvements to existing infrastructure, interoperability, and standardization among systems used by scientists and research contributors, and increased accessibility of research processes and outputs.

The Open Science team is seeking a Science Program Manager for Open Science to drive the execution of open science initiatives in the scientific communities CZI serves. You will manage and assist the development and operations of grant programs to support the five strategic initiatives. You will coordinate closely with the rest of the CZI Science team and the external community. You will be a public advocate of CZI’s mission and our priorities in open science and you will contribute to shaping our strategic directions in this area. The ideal candidate will have a strong understanding of open science practices, how open source software, open data, and collaborative platforms are used in science, and how open communities function.

You will

• Work closely with Science Program teams and the Open Science team to help run grant programs in support of open science and represent them to the outside community: interact with grantees, design and manage the review process, manage the communication channels, and co-design grantee convenings and program workshops.
• Support the Open Science program's strategy by conducting landscaping of the relevant ecosystem and by assessing emerging needs and opportunities in the community.
• Serve as a liaison to the external community (e.g. developers, scientists, other funding agencies, open science advocates, and industry partners), including organizing, attending, and presenting at meetings to represent CZI and its programs and managing the relevant communication channels.
• Collaborate with scientists, software developers, policy-makers and open science advocates to help identify new opportunities for the support and improvement of the open science ecosystem and contribute to shaping CZI’s strategic priorities

You have

• Understanding of how open science resources are developed, shared, managed, and used, in academic and scientific research settings, including knowledge of open data, scientific open source software, scientific and scholarly infrastructure.
• Familiarity with governance, policies, and licensing best practices in open science
• Excellent interpersonal skills, ability to communicate and work with stakeholders from different backgrounds and at different career stages
• 3+ years of product or program management experience in a position such as staff scientist, principal investigator of a research laboratory, software developer, policy manager, product manager, program manager, or in another area of scientific practice or software development such as government, biotechnology, or philanthropy, with a focus on producing, maintaining or supporting open outputs and practices.
• 3+ years of experience in physical or virtual community-building activities, including designing hackathons, conferences, workshops, etc.
• Experience working as a practicing scientist in the life sciences is a plus
• Experience with initiatives to support participation and inclusion from underrepresented communities in science is a plus