ESRC Society Today

The ESRC supports around 10 large-scale interdisciplinary research programmes which are each made up of between 20-25 individual projects spread across different UK institutions in the HE sector. The role of the programme director is to provide overall management, intellectual leadership and academic coherence to this suite of distributed projects. They are also responsible for outreach beyond the academic community, to policymakers and practitioners, politicians, the media, business, industry and voluntary organisations. The post of director is therefore pivotal to the overall success of the programme.

The director will normally be a senior academic with a proven track record in the substantive area of research covered by the programme. They will need to possess well developed management and co-ordination skills and be a first-class communicator with the capacity to reach a wide range of different audiences. Programme Directors are normally appointed on a part-time basis based at an eligible research organisation. 

Announcements for programme director posts are normally made in The Guardian and the THES and on the ESRC website. In certain instances, the ESRC also uses recruitment consultants to assist in the appointment of Directors.