Academic Lead - Digital Research Community

Are you looking for an opportunity to develop your academic leadership skills whilst contributing to the direction and development of UCL's digital research communities?

UCL's Centre for Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is looking for an academic lead for our Digital Research Community. The Digital Research Community, the successor to the eResearch Domain, is the next evolution of academic leadership for this community.

ARC is UCL's research, innovation and service centre for the tools, practices and systems that enable computational science and digital scholarship. 

We are an innovative Centre with both professional services and academic missions:

• We provide advanced, reliable and secure digital research infrastructure to research groups in UCL and beyond.
• We are a laboratory for research, teaching and innovation in compute, data and software intensive research methods.

The Community Product supports ARC's mission to facilitate the transformative impact of digital methods in research in UCL and to optimise dialogue across the computational science and digital scholarship communities in UCL.    

The Role

The Product Owner (academic lead) sets the strategic direction for the product and its alignment to broader UCL objectives. They are responsible for articulating the vision and what success looks like for the community, leading engagement with stakeholders, championing and representing the voice of the community and providing direction to the team.

Duties and Responsibilities of the Role

• To provide unified direction for the community, ensuring alignment to UCL’s broader strategy.
   
• Defining, maintaining and sharing the community vision, strategy and roadmap working with the assigned Agile Delivery Manager (ADM) to build commitment and focus the product team's backlog.
   
• Building and shaping the wider UCL research community who use data and compute approaches  e.g.  communities of practice, code clubs, calls for participation. 

• Work closely with ARC to promote collaborations and connects between Research Technology Professional and research communities across UCL.  
   
• Encourage engagement between  UCL communities and our partner institutions and external networks (e.g UK RSE, HPC Sig...)
   
• Chair termly Digital Research Community Steering Group meetings.

Personal Attribute Required

• Someone who has a broad view of the current and potential use of data and computational approaches across the breadth of research at UCL. 
   
• The ability to secure credibility with academic staff at all levels.
   
•  Leadership skills, especially as required in a complex, research-intensive academic environment.
   
• The ability to create and promote a collegiate and collaborative approach to community based activities.
   
• Experience of chairing academic committees/meetings.

Commitment 

• The Community Product Owner will be a non-remunerated position, available to academic staff. The position will be offered for a period of three years in the first instance, with two reviews of performance at 6 and 12 months.
   
• The product owner will report to the director of ARC and will work closely with the Chair of the Digital Research Committee, ARC community lead and ARC members who are involved in community related activities. The product owner is expected to devote approximately 0.2 FTE a week to the role, paid for by the Digital Research Portfolio. 
   
• We particular welcome applications from researchers with 3-5 years experience who may already be involved in promoting multi-disciplinary research.

Applications in the form of a CV (max 2 pages) and a supporting statement outlining your vision for academic leadership in building digital research communities (max 2 pages). This should be sent via email to arc-proposals@ucl.ac.uk by Monday 10th July, 5 pm. Interviews will take place remotely in late July.