Associate Director of Research Operations

Job Summary:

HGSE is a diverse community of learners, teachers, and employees who are passionate about changing the world by improving education. The Associate Director of Research Operations will be part of the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University. CEPR and its partners believe all students will learn and thrive when education leaders make decisions using facts and findings, rather than untested assumptions. Learn more at cepr.harvard.edu. 

Job-Specific Responsibilities:

The Associate Director of Research Operations is responsible for the administrative operations of CEPR’s analytic team:  allocating research staff across existing projects, ensuring that new project proposals have sufficient staffing, recruiting and onboarding new staff, coordinating with project directors to provide feedback to existing staff, identifying training opportunities for research staff, managing data use agreements and submissions to the Institutional Review Board. The Associate Director of Research Operations will report to the Executive Director and will work closely with the Faculty Director and Director of Research Initiatives for College and Career Success. They will also coordinate with CEPR’s other Associate Directors of Research. The Associate Director will be expected to develop workflows and systems to ensure that CEPR’s research remains compliant with data use agreements and human subjects’ research protections and is appropriately staffed. 

Job-Specific Responsibilities

1. Research Pipeline & Resource Management (45%)

The Associate Director will ensure that each project is appropriately resourced, coordinating across internal staff and external research partners to do so.

• Ensure that new project proposals are clear in scope and appropriately resourced to meet project timelines. 

• Build and maintain a system for allocating staff, managing staff workloads, and project timelines.   

• Inform hiring and pipeline management decisions

• Partner with Directors of Research, Project Directors, and PIs to allocate staff, flag when staff are overburdened, and model tradeoffs when priorities conflict

2. Operational Systems & Compliance (25%)

The Associate Director leads operational process improvement and ensures the team remains in compliance with data use agreements and human research subject protections.

• Maintain a compliance calendar and coordinate adherence to requirements including data use agreements, IRB protocols, funder reporting deadlines, and data privacy standards

• Coordinate with Harvard IT on computing needs

• Develop and maintain standard operating procedures related to data handling, access controls, and use restrictions; serve as a point of escalation for compliance questions and incidents, connecting staff to appropriate institutional or legal resources

3. Talent Development & Team Infrastructure (30%)

The Associate Director owns the full staff lifecycle for the analytic team—from recruitment through offboarding.

• Coordinate recruitment logistics including job postings, candidate scheduling, and offer communication in partnership with HR and hiring managers; own onboarding infrastructure including checklists, systems access coordination, introductory materials, and 30/60/90-day frameworks

• Lead offboarding for departing staff—knowledge transfer, systems access revocation, file organization, and continuity planning—and lead project close-out processes including archival, final documentation, and lessons-learned capture

• Maintain a living library of SOPs, process guides, and onboarding materials; develop and enforce documentation standards and facilitate team trainings as needed

• Develop and manage early career pipeline opportunities, including internships, pre-doctoral programs, and related initiatives