Scientific Programming & Innovation Manager

Scientific Programming & Innovation Manager

A cover letter is required for consideration for this position and should be attached as the first page of your resume. The cover letter should address your specific interest in the position and outline skills and experience that directly relate to this position.

Department Overview

Health Information Technology & Services (HITS) plays an integral role in the success of Michigan Medicine (MM) by providing clinicians, educators, researchers, students, and staff with exceptional technology-related information, products, services, and support. HITS also provides institutional expertise related to IT strategy, security, infrastructure, and resource management.

Division Overview

The HITS Academic IT division (AcadIT) serves the education and research communities at the University of Michigan Medical School. We engage faculty, students, and staff to provide a holistic portfolio of software, applications, infrastructure, device support, and custom projects to enable innovation and excellence.

We are seeking a dynamic and experienced manager for our Scientific Programming & Innovation team within the AcadIT division. This role is an exceptional opportunity for a people-focused leader to shape and drive the strategic direction of scientific development services and data integration needs in support of MM's world-class education, research, and clinical missions. The purpose of the Scientific Programming & Innovation team is to provide Michigan Medicine researchers with greater consistency, continuity, and expertise with the explicit goal of enhancing research activities through our programming and data integration services.

Our services offer researchers help with identifying new solutions or development pipelines, designing and writing code for new projects, refactoring and optimizing existing code, and promoting sustainable development workflows and best practices.

Supervision/Management

• Be responsible for the management, development, and supervision of staff, which includes recruitment, performance management, mentoring, training, workload management, and other administrative activities.
• Ensure the team stays current with advances in relevant technologies. Responsible for maintaining and sharing knowledge of policies, procedures, hardware, software, and technical services.
• Lead and manage staff fostering specialization in a wide range of scripting and coding languages (e.g., Python, R, MATLAB, C/C++/CUDA, SQL), providing a wide range of scientific services to researchers spanning analysis, experimental control, instrument automation, custom research development, parallel programming, research and academic data integrations, and workflow optimizations.
• Establish and institutionalize best practices for AI and LLM assisted development, including agentic workflows and prompt driven "vibe" coding, ensuring responsible, secure, and effective use of automation while maintaining code quality, compliance, and organizational standards.
• Define and execute team strategy and capacity planning, ensuring alignment with the broader organizational direction, and creating a roadmap for successful implementation.
• Prioritize and govern intake, balancing short proof of concept assignments and longer-term research and operational commitments.

Relationship Building/Communications

• Deliver clear, evidence based recommendations to divisional and Medical School leadership for new initiatives, services, and strategic investments.
• Develop a professional knowledge network with other facilitators, both on- and off-campus.
• Champion a culture of collaboration, inclusion, and continuous improvement.

Service Improvement/Reporting Analysis

• Partner with leadership (e.g. HITS, Data Office, Research Leadership Group) to align investments and priorities.
• Partner with subject matter experts to develop continual service improvement frameworks and recommendations for services, products, and processes within the organization.
• Provide recommendations for new and expanded IT services based on analysis and understanding of customer requirements, and advocate for the services on behalf of researchers and educators.
• Proactively identify and lead initiatives to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of services.
• Identify and leverage cross-campus collaborations to advance academic and research activities.

Operational/Production Support

• Provide faculty with one-on-one facilitative project support, recommending sustainable…