Director of Research

The Director of Research leads the IRC's research and innovation team, overseeing research agendas and teams to improve humanitarian impact and scale. This role involves strategic leadership, managing research projects, building organizational capacity, and representing IRC research internally and externally.

Responsibilities

• 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 data.
• 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 targeted policy and practice.
• Present, publish and represent IRC research and innovation at events and meetings to influence key stakeholders.
• Cultivate strong relationships across departments within IRC. Represent the Airbel Impact Lab with senior leaders across the organization.
• Collaborate with Technical Units, Communications and Advocacy on strong research communications to key audiences.
• Fundraise and ensure strong financial management of research team.
• Raise funds needed to support IRC's research agenda and research systems.
• Oversee budgets and the financial health of select research teams, initiatives and projects. Identify and communicate gaps or concerns in a timely manner, and proactively seek out viable solutions.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in field related to development and humanitarian intervention (e.g., economics, epidemiology, political science).
• 10+ years in research, with significant experience in humanitarian or development contexts.
• Extensive experience in designing research and managing research teams in low resource environments.
• Fluency in translating the use of empirical evidence to support technical and implementing teams to know what works best to achieve meaningful results for people.
• Demonstrated fluency with AI- and data-science-enabled research methods, and a track record of using them to modernize or accelerate research processes.
• Demonstrated success in business development for research projects with public and private donors.
• Experience developing and driving research strategy and learning agendas across a large, complex international organization.
• Strong record of publication and authorship/co-authorship of peer-reviewed articles.
• An existing and strong professional network in humanitarian and development research communities.
• Very strong leadership and management competencies including the ability to bring people from diverse backgrounds along with a stated vision and strategy, and capacity to communicate effectively with IRC leadership, technical peers, and colleagues in fundraising, communications and advocacy.
• Excellent public speaking and writing skills.
• Fluency in English is required; Proficiency in French, Arabic or Spanish is a plus.
• Travel up to 25% of the time

Skills

• Research Design
• Research Team Leadership
• Humanitarian Research
• Development research
• Empirical Evidence Translation
• AI-enabled Research Methods
• Data Science Research Methods
• Business Development
• Research Strategy
• Learning Agenda Development
• Publication Authorship
• Professional networking
• Leadership in Research
• Strategic Communications
• Public Speaking
• Technical Writing

Languages

English, French, Arabic, Spanish