Scientific Review Officer (Part Time)

Each year, the funding decisions for thousands of research grants are dependent upon the fair and thorough assessment of scientific merit by a panel of expert reviewers. The proper conduct of peer review is the foundation of sound funding decisions. The essence of peer review is identifying qualified reviewers who have relevant subject matter expertise and who consistently apply the program's review criteria to all applications. Our company assist's clients with programs involving topic areas such as breast cancer, prostate cancer, military health, traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, psychological health, lung cancer, orthopedics, etc. We are currently seeking a Scientific Review Officer (SRO) to join our team. As an SRO, you will work on an intermittent as needed basis from your home office (which can be anywhere across the US), helping government agencies and non-profit organizations determine which grant research projects to fund. SROs will typically work on a minimum of 2 Peer Review projects per year. High performers will work on up to 5-6 Peer Review projects.

Each Peer Review project has 200-300 hours of billable work. SRO positions are home-based with flexible hours, but require travel to client sites and peer review meetings as needed (typically a 3-4 day meeting at min 1 time per year). Ideal candidates would be retired from an academic and/or government scientific career as this is a part time on call position on a long term basis.

Responsibilities

• Determines reviewer expertise required for the panel based on panel description and referral guidelines.
• Recruits reviewers who are generally strong and competent with regard to the subject matter expertise required by the panel and meet the overall criteria outlined by the client.
• Assigns applications/proposals to reviewers and manages all real and perceived conflict of interests.
• Provides appropriate guidance and instruction to reviewers regarding relevant review policies, guidelines, and criteria; critiques preparation and submission.
• Monitors submission timeline and quality of draft critiques, providing appropriate feedback to reviewers.
• Administrates review meeting including panel orientation, panel scoring and discussion, conflict of interest, submission of revised critiques, and panel debriefing.
• Creates summary paragraph and provides budget information and administrative notes for summary statement.
• Performs quality control checking of reviewer critiques to ensure their completeness, accuracy, and adherence to the recorded scores editing to clear scientific language and removing inflammatory comments.

Qualifications

o    Degree Required: MD and/or PhD 
o    5+ years of work experience after postdoctoral work. Ideal candidates would be retired from an academic scientific career.
o    Veterans or civilians with work experience in an MTF environment are highly-sought