Scientific Partnerships Lead at GoGoGrandparent in Philadelphia, PA

Job description

Location: Philadelphia/hybrid Employment type: Full-time Reports to: CEO Experience: 6+ years About GoGoGrandparent GoGo’s mission is to help older adults age independently in their home for as long as possible. Today we do that by supporting them with their errands. For us to ever meaningfully advance the mission, we’d like to use our position as one of the largest membership groups of home bound older adults to advance science that helps address the age related diseases that impact them. Because we interact with our members repeatedly over time, we have an opportunity to build something that is difficult for traditional research organizations to create: a longitudinal human research population that can be recruited, followed, and repeatedly sampled over years. Our goal is to partner with leading academic scientists, research institutions, and eventually biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to use this population to answer important questions about aging, immunity, disease, and human health. The Role We are looking for a Scientific Partnerships Lead to build the external scientific network around this emerging research platform. This person will identify researchers and research programs where GoGo's population can create meaningful scientific value, develop relationships with academic investigators, turn conversations into concrete study concepts, and help secure the funding needed to execute them. We are looking for someone who can sit down with a leading scientist and ask: What important question can't you answer with your existing cohorts—and could our population help you answer it? You will need enough scientific depth to understand the question, enough creativity to see how GoGo's unusual longitudinal relationship with older adults could change the study design, and enough execution ability to turn the collaboration into a research program. You will work closely with the CEO, our clinical/operations teams, and external investigators. What You’ll Do Build the scientific partnership pipeline Identify academic investigators, research programs, translational research centers, and industry scientists whose work could benefit from GoGo's longitudinal older-adult population. Develop relationships with investigators across aging biology, immunology, oncology, neurology, cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, geroscience, and related fields. Develop a deep understanding of each researcher's scientific interests, existing cohorts, unanswered questions, funding situation, and experimental capabilities. Identify opportunities where GoGo's ability to recruit, retain, and repeatedly sample older adults provides something that conventional cohorts cannot. Maintain a structured pipeline of potential scientific collaborations from initial conversation through funded study. Turn scientific questions into collaborations Work with researchers to identify specific, hypothesis-driven research questions that can be tested using GoGo's population. Help translate broad scientific interests into concrete study concepts, including population, endpoints, biospecimens, longitudinal measurements, and potential analyses. Determine what GoGo would contribute and what the academic or industry partner would contribute. Coordinate with internal scientists to assess feasibility and scientific merit. Help investigators identify appropriate funding mechanisms, including NIH, foundations, sponsored research, and industry funding. Develop collaboration proposals, concept notes, research plans, and other materials needed to move opportunities forward. Help shape GoGo's research platform Bring external scientific needs back into GoGo and help determine what capabilities the platform should build. Advise on biospecimen collection, longitudinal data capture, phenotyping, functional assessments, and other cohort infrastructure based on what researchers actually need. Identify gaps in our scientific and operational capabilities and develop partnerships t