Location: University of Southampton, Highfield Campus
Salary: £39,152 to £49,553
Duration: Full Time Fixed Term (until 30/11/2022)
Closing Date: Friday 19 June 2020
Interview Date: To be confirmed

Are you an experienced and ambitious Research and Innovation Development Professional looking to further your career in one of the UK’s leading Innovation Knowledge Centres? Do you have a background in developing and delivering high quality, high impact funding applications that can help us deliver our highly ambitious Strategic Plan (2020–2022) to grow research funding by £40M by 2022?

We are looking for a professional and proactive individual to support NBIC’s Executive Management Team to shape NBIC’s strategic research direction, and to maximise research impact and external income. You will both identify new UK funding and impact opportunities and support academic staff to develop successful inter-disciplinary research proposals. We anticipate that you will have experience of postdoctoral research and of writing academic papers. This is an excellent opportunity for a scientist with strong writing and communications skills who is looking to move away from an active research career. You will also need to have a PhD or equivalent professional qualifications and experience in a relevant scientific and/or technical subject area.

You will be supporting activities for the National Biofilm Innovation Centre (NBIC) led by teams at the Universities of Liverpool, Southampton, Edinburgh and Nottingham with a partnership with 49 universities and research centres across the UK as well as major global centres – The Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE), the Centre for Biofilm Engineering at Montana State University (USA) and an increasing number of international research centres.

This role will be located at the University of Southampton Highfield Campus, however we would also consider applicants that could be based at any of the NBIC core partner universities (Edinburgh, Nottingham or Liverpool).

What will you bring to the role?

To be appointed as Research and Innovation Development Manager, you will have:

• Extensive experience in co-ordinating the entire grant writing process from initial drafting of cases based on input from academic leads through to development of high-quality non-academic sections of proposals, managing letters of support, collating CVs of co-applicants and budget development;
• Relevant research experience within related scientific sectors, gained via a PhD or equivalent research experience within industry/academia;
• Excellent knowledge of the public research and innovation funding sectors with knowledge of the priorities and working of relevant UK funding bodies and funding schemes including: Research Councils; UK Government; Charities; Knowledge Transfer Partnerships; SMART awards; Collaborative R&D; Catalyst Funding through Innovate UK; and other research translation and innovation funding available through Research Council UK; Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; etc.;
• Experience of working with academic researchers and research funders, including previous experience and understanding of the challenges in conducting research, and experience of facilitating collaborations for collaborative/grand challenge/innovation funding bids;
• Experience of working with industry, with an awareness of the associated challenges and opportunities;
• Excellent interpersonal, relationship building, influencing, negotiation and team working skills, with the ability to interact and communicate effectively and sensitively with individuals from a range of backgrounds and at all levels within a complex organisation and a proactive approach to customer service;
• A confident personal leadership style, as evidenced by a track-record of having successfully influenced organisational strategy;
• Proven effective people management skills;
•  Experience of facilitating workshops and sandpit-style events.

Travel to NBIC events and project partners within the UK will be required as part of the post. This full-time, fixed-term post is available until the 30th November 2022.

Please include a covering letter and full CV in your application.