Associate Project Director Ascendis Pharma in Princeton, NJ

Title:

Associate Project Director, GRAPS - Job

Location:

Princeton NJ US

Ascendis Pharma is a dynamic, fast-growing global biopharmaceutical company with locations in Denmark, Europe, and the United States. Today, we're advancing programs in Endocrinology Rare Disease and Oncology.

Here at Ascendis, we pride ourselves on exceptional science, visionary leadership, and skilled and passionate colleagues.

Guided by our core values of Patients, Science, and Passion, we use our Trans Con® drug development platform to fulfill our mission of developing new and potentially best-in-class therapies to address unmet medical needs.

Our culture fosters a place where skilled, adaptable, and highly resourceful professionals can truly make their mark. We offer a dynamic workplace for employees to grow and develop their skills.

The Associate Project Director, GRAPS is a senior project-management professional who translates GRAPS priorities into disciplined execution across Global Regulatory Affairs, Global Patient Safety, and enterprise partners. The role establishes fit-for-purpose governance, integrated plans, decision pathways, performance reporting, and risk management for a portfolio of strategic and operational initiatives.

Working with the Chief Regulatory & Safety Officer, GRAPS Leadership Team, functional leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders, this individual will lead small-to-medium, complex projects and selected larger work streams that require coordination across functions, geographies, vendors, and systems. The role combines strategic perspective with hands‑on delivery and is expected to influence without authority, improve ways of working, and strengthen quality, compliance, predictability, and organizational scalability.

• Lead assigned GRAPS projects and programs from definition through closeout, with clear charters, scope, objectives, outcomes, milestones, owners, dependencies, and success measures.
• Partner with GRAPS leaders to translate strategic priorities into integrated roadmaps and sequenced execution plans aligned with portfolio and enterprise objectives.
• Maintain a consolidated view of the GRAPS project portfolio, distinguishing project work from base-business activity and highlighting capacity constraints, interdependencies, and decisions required.
• Facilitate project initiation, prioritization, stage reviews, lessons learned, and benefits realization.

• Establish and run proportionate governance, including core teams, steering forums, agendas, decision logs, action tracking, and escalation pathways.
• Develop and maintain integrated project plans, critical paths, resource assumptions, budgets, RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, and Dependencies or Decisions) logs, and change controls.
• Monitor execution against scope, schedule, quality, cost, and expected outcomes; identify emerging issues early and drive recovery plans.
• Prepare concise executive dashboards, status reports, decision memos, and recommendations for the GRAPS Leadership Team and other governance bodies.

• Coordinate stakeholders across Regulatory Affairs, Patient Safety, Clinical Development, Medical Affairs, Quality, IT, Finance, HR, Legal, Procurement, and external partners, as applicable.
• Create clarity on roles, accountabilities, interfaces, and handoffs, using fit-for-purpose RACI or equivalent tools.
• Facilitate complex workshops and working sessions that align stakeholders, resolve ambiguity, and convert discussion into decisions and accountable actions.
• Communicate proactively and tailor content for executive, technical, and operational audiences across cultures and time zones.

• Identify opportunities to standardize, simplify, and scale GRAPS processes, templates, tools, and operating practices.
• Partner with process owners and Quality to ensure project deliverables support applicable GxP, regulatory, pharmacovigilance, documentation, training, inspection-readiness, and records-management requirements.
• Use data and trend analysis to monitor performance, identify root causes, and recommend sustainable improvements.
• Support adoption of digital project-management, collaboration, dashboarding, workflow, and knowledge-management capabilities.

• Coordinate resource planning for assigned initiatives and surface…