Research Fellow: Natural scientist or engineer

Research Fellow:
Natural scientist or engineer

The International Institute for Management Development (IMD) has been pioneering leadership development for nearly 80 years. Founded by business for business, we are an independent university institute with Swiss roots and global reach. Operating from Lausanne with strategic hubs in Singapore, Shenzhen, and Cape Town, IMD works with 19,000+ executives from 120+ countries annually. Our 145,000+ alumni form a powerful global network.

Consistently ranked among the world's top business schools, IMD bridges cutting-edge research with real-world application to help leaders solve problems, scale solutions, and drive impact. Real Learning for Real Impact.

To reinforce our team, we are looking for a

Research Fellow:
Natural scientist or engineer
wanting to make a difference in sustainable business practice

The research fellow will work for the Risk & Resilience Initiative. The initiative is led by Prof. Florian Hoos and based on strong collaborations with Prof. Sophie Bacq and Prof. Karl Schmedders, as well as a network of researchers from around the world. The main goal of the initiative is to bring the sustainability conversation back to the boardroom thereby ensuring the resilience and long-term value creation of firms.

Concretely, this means helping corporate boards and investors integrate scientific knowledge (e.g., planetary boundaries, IPCC reports) and social foundations (e.g. what is at the core of Doughnut Economics) into corporate governance, opportunity and risk management. The initiative leverages IMD’s strengths in applied and scientific research, innovative executive education learning format development, and global dissemination, all based on strong partnerships, to maximize impact and longevity of the initiative.

The Research Fellow will contribute to the initiative through developing and conducting novel and relevant research that fulfils the goals of the initiative. Your role is split into Research and Publication tasks as well as Scientific Knowledge Translation, reflecting the dual nature of the role. You will co-develop and conduct novel and relevant research that combines scientific evidence and knowledge with business relevance.

An essential part of your role is therefore to translate Earth-system and natural science knowledge into relevant management research and other communication formats. The output should be research that is publishable in top-tier academic journals and relevant for practitioner outlets. The impact of your research beyond academia is essential. Publication formats therefore include academic- and practitioner-oriented articles, and you might contribute to reports and case studies.

The research fellow should also ensure the successful completion of the publication process, and ideally help creating materials to translate scientific evidence into teaching offerings. The research fellow needs to be able to integrate the scientific evidence with business relevance, and be able to collaborate with business school faculty and research fellows. The research fellow needs to integrate this perspective into study design, creation of research methodologies, data collection, processing and analysis of data as well as the writing for the respective publication outlets.

The aim of the Research Fellow’s work is to generate and disseminate impactful outcomes for both academic and practitioner audiences:

• Co-develop business-relevant research and publish in scientific and/or FT50 journals (and other top-tier academic outlets).
• Act as a strategic radar and translator of scientific evidence into business relevant publications in a team of business school researchers. Your ability to help integrating the sciences into business-relevant publications and work with researchers trained in management and economics is absolutely key.
• Distill key insights from scientific evidence and publish white papers, reports, and other publication formats that reach a broader audience.
• Find, engage, and collaborate with stakeholders from the sciences to support our research and contribute to the overall goal of the initiative.
• Leverage various dissemination channels to communicate and translate the research insights.
• Contribute to strategy development for the initiative that guarantees its long-term success

• Academic background:
  PhD in engineering or natural sciences (e.g. Earth sciences, life sciences, environmental engineering, industrial ecology, and related fields). The ideal candidate further demonstrates business relevance of the PhD or publications after the PhD, and a great understanding of sustainability for business. The quality of the PhD should be proven through high quality working papers, or ideally through RRs or publications in top-tier academic journals.
  
  A big advantage is experience with management, business, or economics journals such as (but not limited to) FT50 journals or outlets such as Nature Sustainability, Nature…