Basic Life Research Scientist

Job Description

BUSINESS TITLE: Basic Life Research Scientist

WORK SCHEDULE:

Hybrid work arrangement

BUDGETED SALARY:

The expected pay range for this position is $71,000 to $108,000 per annum.

SCHOOL/UNIT DESCRIPTION:

The Stanford Digital Brain Project is a five-year, multi-investigator initiative to build a foundation model of the healthy adult human brain. We are collecting deep, stimulus-driven brain imaging data at unprecedented scale using 7T fMRI and OPM-MEG, with data organized into sequential scientific tranches and released publicly along with trained models and benchmarks. The project involves faculty across Stanford neuroscience, psychology, and computer science, purpose-built imaging facilities, and external compute partnerships. Data collection for the first tranche is beginning now.

POSITION SUMMARY:

We are hiring a scientific project manager to serve as the operational backbone of the project during its most intensive phase. The project runs through five working groups (7T fMRI, OPM-MEG, Tranche 1 design, informatics, computational modeling) led by faculty who are also running labs. Progress currently depends on faculty and a small staff absorbing coordination work that has outgrown them. You would take that on. This is a tactical, embedded role. You will sit inside the working groups, not above them. You will know what every group is doing this week, what is blocking them, and who owes what to whom. You will work alongside the project's executive leadership, who handle strategy, governance, and external partnerships, and you will be the person who makes sure decisions made on Friday still exist on Monday.

This is a two year, fixed term position.

What you will do

• Track milestones, dependencies, and action items across all working groups; maintain the project's integrated plan and make status visible to the steering committee without anyone having to ask

• Attend working group and steering committee meetings; capture decisions, owners, and open questions in a form the project can rely on

• Chase and close the loop: unowned actions, stalled dependencies, and cross-group handoffs (for example, connecting an acquisition pipeline to a processing pipeline, or a stimulus freeze to a manifest build)

• Coordinate operational logistics around data collection readiness: vendor timelines, equipment evaluation, facility scheduling, pilot experiment sequencing

• Support hiring operations: candidate tracking, outreach coordination, onboarding of postdocs, research coordinators, and technical staff

• Prepare pre-reads and decision memos so steering committee time goes to decisions rather than status

• Maintain the project's tracking infrastructure (Google Workspace based; deliberately simple)

PREFERRED/DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

REQUIRED:

• PhD in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, or a related field, or equivalent research experience. You need enough domain fluency to follow a discussion about noise ceilings, retention functions, or preprocessing pipelines and know what matters and what is blocking

• Experience with human neuroimaging research operations (fMRI, MEG/EEG, or similar); familiarity with what it takes to run participants at scale is a strong plus

• Demonstrated ability to run coordination for a multi-stakeholder project: you have owned a tracker that people actually trusted

• Comfort working with senior faculty as a peer in the room and holding them to owners and dates without friction

• Bias toward lightweight tools and written records over process ceremony

• Comfort with ambiguity; this project is being built while it runs