Project Manager
What this job does:
Coordinates complex scientific or drug development projects from start to finish, ensuring teams stay on schedule, within budget, and aligned with regulatory requirements. Day-to-day involves running meetings, tracking milestones, managing budgets, communicating across departments, and troubleshooting roadblocks. Serves as the organizational glue that keeps multi-team R&D initiatives moving forward.
This job is similar to these lab/research tasks:
Managing complex multi-year research projects, coordinating collaborators and timelines, managing budgets and grant funding, troubleshooting when timelines go off-course, bringing major deliverables from concept to completion
Typical starting salary range
$95k to $160k
Salary estimate represented as 25th to 75th percentile. Gathered from recent job postings, Glassdoor.com, and Salary.com
Daily task breakdown
- Meetings, stakeholder communication, and status updates (30%)
- Project planning, scheduling, and timeline management (25%)
- Budget tracking, resource allocation, and vendor management (15%)
- Risk assessment, issue resolution, and decision-making (15%)
- Documentation, reporting, and regulatory compliance review (15%)
Skills you'll use in this job:
Project management (Agile, Waterfall); cross-functional team leadership; stakeholder communication and presentation; budgeting and financial forecasting; risk management; regulatory knowledge (FDA, GxP, ICH); project management tools (MS Project, Smartsheet, JIRA); change management; scientific/technical literacy; negotiation and conflict resolution; strategic planning
Talk about these PhD skills in your resume and interview:
Talk about managing complex, multi-year research projects - from designing experiments and setting timelines to coordinating with collaborators and presenting results. Highlight your experience managing budgets (grants and lab funding), coordinating multi-site collaborations, meeting grant deadlines, and troubleshooting when timelines go off-course. Frame your dissertation and publications as major deliverables brought from concept to completion on schedule.
Alternative job titles to search:
Scientific Project Manager; Program Manager (Life Sciences); R&D Project Manager; Technical Project Manager; Research Program Manager; Drug Development Project Manager; Project Lead (Life Sciences); Associate Director of Project Management
*Note:
-Job titles are inconsistent between companies. Try various keywords.
-PhDs tend to undershoot seniority level. Target higher than you think.
