Université La Sagesse (ULS) is seeking Research Grants Manager to lead the Grants Unit within the Higher Center of Research and oversee the full lifecycle of externally funded research projects.
The role involves identifying funding opportunities, supporting researchers in developing competitive grant proposals and budgets, and ensuring effective grant administration, financial compliance, reporting, and project close-out.
Key Responsibilities:
1. Funding Intelligence and Proposal Development
- Maintain a funding calendar and screen calls for eligibility, strategic fit, deadlines and institutional commitments; circulate a monthly funding digest to the deans and relevant academic and research stakeholders to support the University's research priorities.
- Support principal investigators with work plans, partner documentation, administrative forms and submission portals, ensuring the completeness, quality and timely submission of competitive research proposals.
- Prepare and verify proposal budgets with Finance, including eligible costs, staff allocations, co-financing and overheads, in accordance with funder requirements and institutional financial policies.
2. Award Setup and Implementation
- Coordinate the institutional review of grant agreements, consortium agreements and amendments with Legal and the relevant institutional offices, ensuring alignment with funding conditions and University policies before approval and signature.
- Set up project files, budget codes, reporting calendars and responsibility matrices with Finance and project leads, ensuring clearly defined roles, responsibilities and reporting obligations throughout the grant lifecycle.
- Monitor expenditure against approved budgets, deadlines and deliverables; flag variances and coordinate amendments before changes are implemented, while proactively identifying financial, operational and compliance risks and recommending corrective actions.
3. Compliance, Reporting and Audit
- Coordinate technical reports with principal investigators and financial reports with Finance; obtain required institutional approvals before submission, ensuring accuracy, completeness and compliance with funder deadlines and reporting requirements.
- Maintain complete, accurate and audit-ready documentation, including evidence for staff assignments, time records where required, procurement, expenditure, outputs and reporting.
- Confirm with the Ethics and Institutional Review Board (IRB) Manager that ethics approval is in place before funded activity involving human participants or personal data begins; track data management, open access, intellectual property and visibility obligations with the responsible offices, ensuring that applicable ethical, regulatory and contractual requirements are appropriately addressed.
- Coordinate audit requests, corrective actions and project close-out, including funder-specific retention requirements, and ensure timely resolution of audit findings and proper closure of financial and administrative obligations.
4. Unit Leadership
- Supervise the Research Grants Officer: allocate pre-award and post-award workload, set objectives, review work and contribute to performance appraisal, while providing coaching, professional development opportunities and regular performance feedback.
- Ensure every live award has a named administrator and a back-up, and that grant procedures and templates are documented, promoting operational continuity, accountability and effective knowledge transfer within the Grants Unit.
5. Systems and Researcher Support
- Maintain grants templates, submission records and an institutional award register, ensuring accurate, up-to-date and accessible information for institutional monitoring, reporting and decision-making.
- Provide practical guidance, proposal clinics and training to researchers and project administrators, with particular attention to first-time applicants, to strengthen institutional grant-writing capacity, funding competitiveness and compliance awareness.
- Supply award and output data to the Research Dissemination Coordinator, and report the funding pipeline, submissions, success rates, awards, expenditure risks and reporting status to the Director of the Higher Center of Research, providing analysis and recommendations to improve research funding performance and support strategic decision-making.
6. Authority and Coordination
- Prepare and recommend actions within delegated authority. Agreements, expenditure, payments and employment commitments require approval by the authorised university offices and signatories.
Educational Background:
Master’s degree or PhD in research administration, project management, finance, business, engineering or a relevant academic discipline with experience.
Professional Experience:
At least five years in research grants or externally funded project administration, covering pre-award and post-award work.
Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience with Horizon Europe, Erasmus+, PRIMA or Interreg NEXT MED programmes.
• Experience in a university research office or a multi-partner international consortium.
• Experience supervising or training administrative staff.
• Certification in project management or research administration.
Interested in Joining ULS?
We invite qualified candidates who are passionate about academic excellence, operational efficiency, and contributing to a well-organized university environment to apply.
Interested candidates are encouraged to submit their applications through the LinkedIn job posting.
We look forward to welcoming dedicated professionals who share our commitment to excellence and continuous improvement.
