Senior Program Manager

Job Title:  SPM – Government Policy and Programs Foundation for Advancing Science and Technology Background We live in a world of fast-paced innovation today, driven by exponential progress in science and technology (S&T) and the growth of vibrant ecosystems to commercialize research. India must aspire to be a top 3 S&T Nation, where the first two places are occupied by US and China today. To do so, India needs to be at the forefront of research: the creation of new knowledge (research) and its translation to economic and social goods . This is imperative for long-term industry differentiation and competitiveness, National security, and self-reliance to attain our socio-economic goals. The time for India to revive its S&T agenda is now or never. We have the economic size, the talent pool, a large market size and a vibrant startup ecosystem to both invest in research and be able to translate S&T knowledge into economic value. For India to be a global leader, exponential S&T growth needs to go hand-in-hand with economic growth and social progress. While the West has traditionally dominated global S&T, many Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan have made rapid progress in the past, and China has dramatically scaled its S&T prowess to become #2 in the world behind USA. India's Contribution is relatively dwarfed - its high impact research output is ranked 1oth, with US & China being the top 2, no Indian university shows up in top 100 research rankings, with just 1 company in world's top 50 innovative companies. Way of Work The Foundation for Advancing Science and Technology (FAST India) is a non-profit institution of excellence dedicated to catalyse India's journey to a top 3 S&T Nation. We identify that the major stakeholders for S&T include the government, the research institutions and the industry. There are systemic challenges with how these actors today work, such as size of ambition, right incentives, resource allocation and efficiency. Our way of working is to identify these challenges, develop and vigorously advocate policy solutions and best practices to address them. We also identify high-leverage projects that can have an outsized impact on the ecosystem, and run programs with stakeholders, where we lend our team of experts, to make sure best practices are used and the program is impactful. At maturity, we see the ecosystem develop the virtuous cycle of research funding, new breakthrough research, translation into economic value, and re-investment. While we build the ecosystem, we also look forward to build a strong narrative of S&T leadership in India and create political salience around it. In a short period of time, FAST has started engagements with the Office of PSA (Govt of India), Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Capacity Building Commission of India and Banaras Hindu University , among others. Our projects span easing procurement for…