Associate Director, Medical Grants and Sponsorship

Medical Governance Office Leader

OBJECTIVES / PURPOSE

• Provides enterprise-level governance, portfolio and operational leadership for medical grants, medical education grants and sponsor ships within Global Medical.
• Ensures that funding decisions are transparent, objective, well documented, aligned with enterprise Medical priorities, Therapeutic Area strategies, unmet scientific or educational need, patient-centric outcomes, and compliant with Takeda standards and applicable industry requirements.
• Establishes and maintains clear funding frameworks, decision criteria, review pathways, committee operations, documentation expectations, budget visibility, system/repository requirements and lifecycle oversight from intake through close-out. The role partners with Global Therapeutic Areas, regions, LOC Medical, Ethics & Compliance, Legal and Finance to define areas of scientific and educational interest, prioritize funding and enable consistent decision-making across geographies.
• Chairs and/or facilitates Global Grant Review Committee discussions, supports objective, fair and balanced decision-making, and helps evolve a globally harmonized grants and sponsor ships model.

ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Establish, maintain and evolve enterprise governance standards for medical grants, medical education grants and sponsor ships to ensure consistent quality, transparency, accountability, appropriate oversight and compliance across global markets.
• Translate enterprise Medical and Therapeutic Area priorities into practical funding frameworks, including defined areas of scientific and educational interest, unmet need statements, prioritization criteria and funding guardrails.
• Shape and maintain the global areas of scientific and educational interest for grants and sponsor ships in partnership with Global Therapeutic Areas and Medical leadership, ensuring that external funding priorities are clearly linked to unmet need, Medical strategy, disease-area priorities, patient-centric outcomes and independence requirements.
• Drive portfolio-level prioritization across Therapeutic Areas, geographies, proactive funding opportunities, calls for grants, strategic initiatives, and reactive/unsolicited requests, balancing Medical priorities, unmet need, patient/public health impact, budget availability, fairness of review, and independence requirements.
• Define and continuously refine decision criteria, review pathways, governance standards and decision rights so that funding decisions are anchored in unmet need, patient-centric outcomes, scientific merit, transparency, and compliance.
• Chair and/or facilitate Grant Review Committee meetings, including agenda setting, pre-read review, request summaries, structured discussion, conflict-of-interest considerations, voting integrity, decision documentation and follow-up actions.
• Ensure appropriate cross-functional representation and input from Medical, Global Therapeutic Areas, Ethics & Compliance, Legal, Finance, regional and local Medical teams where relevant to the nature of the request.
• Oversee lifecycle governance for external funding requests from intake and eligibility review through committee decision, agreement handoff, milestone and payment visibility, reconciliation tracking, outcomes reporting, close-out and archiving.
• Assess grant and sponsorship requests against consistent criteria, including requester eligibility, needs assessment, scientific or educational objectives, provider qualifications, program design, audience, budget, deliverables, outcomes plan, disclosure needs and potential risk indicators.
• Maintain governance visibility through grant-management systems, repositories, documentation standards, status tracking, budget commitments, decision rationale, dashboards, metrics and leadership-ready summaries.
• Partner with Finance to support budget planning, forecasting, tracking, reconciliation and visibility across Therapeutic Areas, regions and funded activity types, while maintaining clear separation between funding strategy and inappropriate commercial influence.
• Partner with Legal and Ethics & Compliance to ensure appropriate agreements, templates, policy interpretation,…