Director of Research

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world's worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is one of the world's largest international humanitarian non-governmental organizations (INGO), at work in more than 40 countries and 29 U.S. cities helping people to survive, reclaim control of their future and strengthen their communities.

If you're a solutions-driven, passionate change-maker, come join us in positively impacting the lives of millions of people world-wide for a better future.

The Airbel Impact Lab -- the International Rescue Committee's (IRC's) research and innovation team -- designs, tests, and scales life-changing, cost-effective solutions for people affected by conflict and disaster. By applying deep technical expertise and field experience with a range of skills from research to human-centered design, we take a multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving in humanitarian contexts. We are a leading contributor of impact evaluations and other research in humanitarian settings.

Our portfolio consists of nearly 300 research and innovation projects across 40 countries; and we've collectively published over 150 journal articles in peer-reviewed publications on education, nutrition, violence prevention, health and economic programs. We use this research to increase the IRC's impact and to change the way humanitarian aid is delivered around the world.

The Director of Research will be a strategic and technical leader on conducting research to improve impact and scale across IRC programs and influence the humanitarian sector to take up research results and findings. They will continue to build organizational capacity and systems for research, drive ambitious research agendas across IRC technical sectors, and lead research teams and projects to answer the most pressing questions to improve humanitarian impact and scale.

• Oversee research agendas and manage select research teams to deliver high quality research.
• Provide oversight and strategic direction to research agendas across select outcome areas (e.g. health, climate and economic recovery and development and protection)
• Engage with IRC technical units and research teams to generate and use evidence to improve impact, equity, influence and scale across outcomes.
• Lead high performing research teams to develop research projects and deliver on ambitious workplans to carry out research agendas.
• Oversee workforce planning to deliver select research agendas and proactively identify and fill staffing gaps where needed.
• Cultivate and support passionate team members, creating a space of belonging, professional development, and research excellence across a geographically dispersed team.
• Oversee community of practice for research across IRC countries.
• Lead strategic, cross-sectoral research projects.
• Lead flagship cross-sectoral strategic projects, driving evidence generation for scale.
• Identify and shape new cross-sectoral research and funding opportunities that advance IRC's Impact at Scale priorities.
• Serve as PI on key research projects, generating evidence on high impact humanitarian solutions and advancing cutting edge methods in humanitarian settings.
• Strengthen organizational systems to carry out high quality, ethical analysis making responsible use of .
• Serve as IRC's Institutional Review Board Chair. Support teams to maintain high ethical standards in research.
• Drive adoption of AI and data science tools across the research lifecycle -- design, data collection, cleaning, analysis, and dissemination -- to increase the speed and rigor of evidence generation.
• Support country and regional program teams to streamline and carry out high quality data collection for research priorities.
• Strengthen and continuously improve our research systems, including standards and support for high quality data collection, cleaning, coding, analysis, writing and dissemination, including to participants and communities involved in research.
• Strengthen systems for data storage, cleaning, sharing and analysis, as well as for version control and reproducibility.
• Develop strong partnerships and represent research internally and externally.
• Develop and maintain effective partnerships for research priorities at country, regional and global level that will amplify IRC's ability to generate evidence and influence…