Associate Director, Engagement & Diversity Delivery

Our Fortune 500 global Pharmaceutical client is seeking an experienced Associate Director, Engagement & Diversity Delivery.

Job Summary:

The Associate Director, Engagement & Diversity Delivery is responsible for identifying and operationalizing innovative approaches, vendors, and third-party solutions to support recruitment and retention of representative patient populations, accelerate enrollment, and improve retention across clinical trials.

The role partners across Patient Engagement, Clinical Capabilities, and CDDA to execute therapeutic strategies, oversee content and vendor performance, share best practices, and resolve issues. The Associate Director also provides financial oversight, evaluates performance, and adjusts or stops approaches that do not meet expectations.

The role promotes efficiency, quality, inspection readiness, and timely delivery while influencing cross-functional stakeholders to optimize clinical trial outcomes.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Technical Leadership:

• Accountable to operationalize the clinical trial recruitment and retention strategies, inclusive of representative populations, across the therapeutic areas of focus; this includes making judgement-based decisions, influencing peers and leadership to optimize delivery, and oversight of applicable budgets to drive value-based delivery.

• Responsible for driving the execution of the therapeutic/clinical trial strategy through consistent use of goal setting framework, innovative patient recruitment and retention approaches and content (e.g., novel recruitment, patient facing content), and on time delivery to ensure timely submission to the regulatory authorities.

• Responsible for collaborating with Clinical Capabilities and CDDA functional representatives in creation, implementation, and measurement of diversity strategies.

• Responsible for Applying community-based research capabilities in alignment with the defined strategy to enable increased access of clinical trials to representative populations.

• Responsible for partnering with the Engagement & Diversity Capabilities & Services Management representatives to identify innovative capabilities/vendors/third parties to operationalize the therapeutic strategies, and to ensure the establishment of appropriate key performance indicators to monitor vendor/third party performance.

• Responsible for ensuring the creation of culturally sensitive health literate deliverables (e.g., novel recruitment, patient facing content, investigator/ site educational materials) to optimize delivery of the recruitment and retention strategies.

• Responsible for maintaining and expanding key internal and external relationships (e.g., patient groups, professional organizations, etc.) to increase enrollment and retention of representative populations.

• Responsible for ensuring a culture of quality and inspection readiness, and ensuring activities are executed in a manner consistent with established guidelines, best practices and in compliance with all appropriate regulations globally.

1. Enterprise Leadership

• Responsible for ensuring continuous improvement by understanding the needs/challenges of patients/caregivers and investigators and influencing internal change to improve their experiences.

• Responsible for leading and influencing cross functional communication and shared learning to ensure common understanding of experiences, accountabilities and best practices.

• Responsible for driving adoption of innovative approaches/tactics to enable successful recruitment and retention of representative patient populations; anticipate issues and proactively mitigate to ensure optimized delivery of strategies and goals.

• Responsible for leveraging data in dashboard trends for continuous learning and improvement of future studies/programs from engagement through retention.

• Responsible for engaging external capabilities/vendors/third parties to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage in the execution of recruitment and retention strategies.

• Responsible for engaging with industry representatives to gain understanding of organizational experiences and best practices; seek opportunity to shape environmental practices.

• Responsible for creating a culture of partnership and shared learning to identify best practices and standardize approaches to drive efficiency and optimized value.

• Responsible for supporting the learning and application of cultural understanding into the delivery of strategies that can be successfully implemented in our clinical programs.

Other Details:

Schedule: 40 hours/week

Work Setup: Hybrid (3 days onsite, 2 days remote – flexible) in Indianapolis, IN

Contract Length: 12 months – w/ possible extension

Travel: Minimal travel required (10-25%)

Requirements

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in a scientific or health-related field, marketing (or equivalent degree)

• Minimum 5 years experience in clinical trials/drug development or broader pharmaceutical industry

Preferred Qualifications:

• Post-graduate degree, e.g., PharmD, M.S., M.B.A. or Ph.D.

• Broad understanding of the pharmaceutical drug/device development process

• Demonstrated knowledge and experience with project management tools and processes

• Proven ability to lead, influence and deliver to timelines

• Excellent communication (written and verbal) skills to interact with representative groups and individuals

• Demonstrated organizational and critical thinking skills

• Prior experience managing complex/cross-functional projects

• Strong understanding of the clinical drug development processes and the interdependencies of the various tasks/functions

• Experience working at and/or with clinical research investigators and representatives

• Demonstrated ability to lead and influence team members and extended team members toward a common goal

• Ability to anticipate and resolves key technical, operational, or business problems

• Ability to drive and generate innovative solutions to increase clinical trial access for representative populations

• Minimal travel required (10-25%)

Benefits

• Health Insurance: Eligibility to enroll in medical, dental, and vision insurance plans. You may also participate in a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) or Health Savings Account (HSA) for qualified healthcare and dependent care expenses.

• Voluntary Benefits: Option to enroll in employee-paid voluntary benefits, including life insurance, short- and long-term disability insurance, and long-term care insurance.

• 401(k) Plan: Eligibility to participate in the company’s 401(k) retirement plan. Please note, this plan does not include an employer contribution.

• Commuter Benefits: Eligibility to participate in a commuter benefits program, allowing the use of pre-tax dollars for transit and/or parking expenses.

• Paid Time Off (PTO): You will accrue two weeks of vacation annually (prorated based on your start date), in addition to sick leave accrued in accordance with applicable state laws. You will also receive 11 company-paid holidays each year.

Note: Benefits will be effective after 30 days.