Assistant Director of Research Operations

Department

UL Inclusive Economy Lab

We partner with policymakers, community-based organizations and others to identify their most urgent and pressing challenges, co-generate evidence about what works, and translate findings into policy changes that end intergenerational poverty. By identifying barriers to social mobility and racial equity and highlighting the programs and policies that have the most positive impact, our work aims to create greater economic opportunity. We specialize in evaluating programs with the potential to improve lives in three main areas:

• College and Career Success
• Basic Needs
• Quality Jobs

The job manages academic, research, clinical or administrative programs.

• Develop and maintain clear guidelines for how research teams create, organize, store, and access research knowledge and resources, including building out and maintaining the organizational wiki.
• Centralize and streamline IEL's existing research repository, ensuring that prior work and methodological resources are easy to reference.
• Build and manage best practices for onboarding new research team members to IEL's previously published research, so that institutional knowledge transfers effectively as the team grows.
• Manage and work with the Scientific Director to refine project selection. This includes ensuring the completeness and timeliness of materials shared with LOT, following up on next steps for provisionally approved projects, and providing new project updates at staff meetings.
• Support the Scientific Director in formalizing the onboarding of new affiliates.
• Identify potential new affiliates as the Lab builds out new bodies of work, with specific focus on engaging Booth faculty as appropriate.
• Maintain list of current research affiliates and ensure external and internal communication is up to date.
• Support planning and execution of the IEL affiliate speaker series, working closely with the Scientific Director.
• Identify areas for Affiliate Research engagement with the Lab outside of project work.
• Develop and manage annual 360 feedback process for research affiliates.
• Support the scientific director in launching an academic conference focused on applied policy research.
• Identify areas to expand the Lab's visibility with academic audiences.
• Lead the design and execution of IEL's internal program evaluation curriculum to build RM team capacity in causal inference and impact evaluation methods.
• Manage lab-wide research learning and trainings, including topic planning, speaker coordination, and content development, working closely with the Scientific Director. This includes taking ownership of training Tuesdays and research training components of Town Hall meetings.
• Identify research-related training gaps across the team and develop programming to address them.
• Support the Director of Analytics in launching an internal AI working group across the Lab.
• Develop practical guidance, tools, and standards for incorporating AI responsibly into research workflows, from literature reviews to coding to writing. Launch and support pilots aimed at increasing the efficiency of our work without compromising research quality, rigor, and integrity.
• Work closely with the Scientific Director and Qualitative Research Director to support development of a protocol for mixed methods research.
• Help the lab navigate its integration into Rustandy and Booth by developing clear frameworks and expectations around Rustandy-driven, non-IEL projects that IEL staff will support.
• Field inquiries for research support from Booth faculty and scope our involvement, identifying relevant staff support in collaboration with the DOA and DRM and provide direct research support as necessary/appropriate.
• Establish norms, intake processes, and documentation standards that allow both streams of work to coexist productively.
• Develop and communicate program priorities and performance standards and assess operations using these criteria. Plan and conduct quality assurance reviews and recommend changes as appropriate.
• Has a deep understanding when interacting with faculty, researchers and staff for committee work or information.
• Performs…