Associate Head of Pre-Award

Job Purpose

The Associate Head of Pre-Award is accountable for the University’s pre-award and research development function, ensuring institutional preparedness for competitive research funding in alignment with MBZUAI’s strategic research priorities. The role serves as the execution lead to the Head of Grants Management, translating research plans into operational delivery across horizon scanning, proposal development, costing governance, research compliance, internal clearance processes, and sponsor submissions. The position is responsible for establishing scalable pre-award frameworks, strengthening funding pipelines through sustained faculty engagement, and embedding compliant, efficient workflows to enable high-impact research growth.

Key Responsibilities

Pre-Award Operations & Compliance

• Facilitate development of pre-award framework governing opportunity intake, Call for proposals/guidelines, proposal preparation, evaluation committee set-up, internal clearance, and sponsor submission and negotiation.
• Ensure pre-award practices align with sponsor requirements, institutional policy, and governance standards.
• Maintain a centralized pre-award portfolio to track all statistics pertaining to submissions, approvals, timelines, and outcomes at all times.
• Implement quality assurance measures to ensure proposals are complete, viable, and compliant with institutional and sponsor requirements (including research ethics, conflict of interest, intellectual property, IDC, and export control), prior to submission and through award initiation.
• Collaborate with Legal, Research Ethics, Contracts and Post-Award teams to ensure sponsor terms, risk positions, and institutional obligations are addressed pre-submission.
• Support pro-active development of all proposals – internal and external – including inter/disciplinary and large-scale programmatic submissions aligned with global best practices.
• Track proposal and award status actions including NCE, contract modifications, SOW revisions, etc.

Pre-Award Functional Planning

• Operationalize the pre-award function through a structured, multi-year funding pipeline aligned with faculty growth and institutional priorities, applicable across all external funding opportunities and programs, as well as competitive internal mechanisms for centers, flagship initiatives, university partnerships, and strategic projects.
• Establish performance indicators and monitoring mechanisms for pre-award throughput, competitiveness, and success rates at all times.
• Support priority research themes and calls to advance funding diversification across public, philanthropic, and industry sponsors, while identifying applicable funding opportunities.
• Contribute to institutional working groups related to research planning, funding benchmarking, and internal controls, where applicable.

Research Development & Funding Pipeline Management

• Organize and deliver proposal planning workshops to promote engagement with external funding opportunities.
• Maintain and regularly update a consolidated list of relevant funding calls across government, foundation, industry, and multilateral sponsors.
• Share targeted funding opportunities with faculty based on research strengths and MBZUAI strategic priorities.
• Actively support faculty in shaping competitive proposals, including early concept development and positioning to funding calls.
• Work with academic leads to align on priority research themes, centers, and flagship initiatives along with upcoming funding opportunities.
• Maintain institutional trackers to support leadership visibility over upcoming submissions, priorities, and resource planning.
• Prepare consolidated portfolio reports for senior management and committees.

Budgeting & Costing Governance

• Oversee proposal costing methodologies in coordination with the Post-Award and Finance functions.
• Ensure budgets comply with sponsor rules, institutional policy, employment structures, and recovery principles.
• Provide guidance on complex multi-year and multi-partner submissions, including cost eligibility, contributions, and risk exposure.
• Support leadership with scenarios to inform strategic bid decisions.

Process and Policy Development

• Develop institutional guidance on proposals across various key research domains, IDC, PI Status, Residual Balances, Fund retention, etc.
• Standardize templates, and toolkits for proposal development and research development services.
• Ensure pre-award workflows align with award implementation and reporting requirements including progress reporting, research outputs, research impact, etc.
• Contribute to the design of institutional research administration systems and embedded controls for compliant delivery.
• Maintain audit-ready documentation standards for pre-award records and approvals.

Automation & Systems Enablement

• Serve as the pre-award functional point of contact for the Grants Management System (GMS) project, translating operational needs into workflows.
• Manage, input and maintain all pre-award data including opportunity intake, internal routing, approvals, budgeting, and submission tracking.
• Partner with Post-Award during configuration, testing, and user validation.
• Support user enablement, training content, and change adoption for pre-award workflows.
• Use designated systems and tools (including GMS, CRM, RIS, etc.) to record proposal data, route approvals, track project progress and outcomes.

Change Management

• Adopt standardized pre-award processes and workflows across internal and external funding mechanisms.
• Deliver training and enablement sessions to embed new practices and system use.
• Continuously assess process performance and implement improvements to reduce administrative burden and cycle times.

Stakeholder & Team Management

• Serve as the operational counterpart to the Head of Grants Management for pre-award delivery and execution of all funding programs.
• Build, mentor, and lead pre-award staff, embedding service standards and accountability.
• Coordinate cross-functional inputs (Provost, Legal, Finance, Procurement, Operational Excellence) for alignment on high-quality submissions.

Other Duties

• Carry out all other duties as reasonably directed by the manager that are commensurate with these functional objectives.

Academic Qualification

• A Master’s degree in Business Administration, Public Administration, Science/Engineering, or a related discipline.
• A postgraduate is preferred, but not mandatory.

Professional Experience

Essential

• Minimum of 7 years of experience in research development, proposal management, or pre-award research administration within higher education or research-intensive environments.
• Demonstrated leadership of complex, multi-partner submissions and institutional proposal portfolios.
• Proven ability to partner with academic leadership to translate strategy into funded outcomes.
• Strong financial literacy in proposal costing and sponsor compliance.

Preferred

• Experience contributing to enterprise research administration systems (e.g., GMS/ERP) design or implementation.
• Exposure to large-scale, programmatic, or international research consortia.
• Experience establishing institutional pre-award frameworks in growing research organizations.