Scientific Partnerships Lead

Location: Philadelphia/hybrid
Employment type: Full-time
Reports to: CEO
Experience: 6+ years

About GoGoGrandparent

GoGo’s mission is to help older adults age independently in their home for as long as possible. Today we do that by supporting them with their errands. For us to ever meaningfully advance the mission, we’d like to use our position as one of the largest membership groups of home bound older adults to advance science that helps address the age related diseases that impact them.

Because we interact with our members repeatedly over time, we have an opportunity to build something that is difficult for traditional research organizations to create: a longitudinal human research population that can be recruited, followed, and repeatedly sampled over years. Our goal is to partner with leading academic scientists, research institutions, and eventually biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to use this population to answer important questions about aging, immunity, disease, and human health.

The Role

We are looking for a Scientific Partnerships Lead to build the external scientific network around this emerging research platform.

This person will identify researchers and research programs where GoGo's population can create meaningful scientific value, develop relationships with academic investigators, turn conversations into concrete study concepts, and help secure the funding needed to execute them.

We are looking for someone who can sit down with a leading scientist and ask:

What important question can't you answer with your existing cohorts—and could our population help you answer it?

You will need enough scientific depth to understand the question, enough creativity to see how GoGo's unusual longitudinal relationship with older adults could change the study design, and enough execution ability to turn the collaboration into a research program.

You will work closely with the CEO, our clinical/operations teams, and external investigators.

What You’ll Do

Build the scientific partnership pipeline

• Identify academic investigators, research programs, translational research centers, and industry scientists whose work could benefit from GoGo's longitudinal older-adult population.
• Develop relationships with investigators across aging biology, immunology, oncology, neurology, cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, geroscience, and related fields.
• Develop a deep understanding of each researcher's scientific interests, existing cohorts, unanswered questions, funding situation, and experimental capabilities.
• Identify opportunities where GoGo's ability to recruit, retain, and repeatedly sample older adults provides something that conventional cohorts cannot.
• Maintain a structured pipeline of potential scientific collaborations from initial conversation through funded study.

Turn scientific questions into collaborations

• Work with researchers to identify specific, hypothesis-driven research questions that can be tested using GoGo's population.
• Help translate broad scientific interests into concrete study concepts, including population, endpoints, biospecimens, longitudinal measurements, and potential analyses.
• Determine what GoGo would contribute and what the academic or industry partner would contribute.
• Coordinate with internal scientists to assess feasibility and scientific merit.
• Help investigators identify appropriate funding mechanisms, including NIH, foundations, sponsored research, and industry funding.
• Develop collaboration proposals, concept notes, research plans, and other materials needed to move opportunities forward.

Help shape GoGo's research platform

• Bring external scientific needs back into GoGo and help determine what capabilities the platform should build.
• Advise on biospecimen collection, longitudinal data capture, phenotyping, functional assessments, and other cohort infrastructure based on what researchers actually need.
• Identify gaps in our scientific and operational capabilities and develop partnerships to fill them.
• Help establish standards for study feasibility, scientific quality, collaboration, data access, publication, and intellectual property.
• Work with internal scientists to ensure that the cohort develops around important scientific questions rather than becoming a collection of samples in search of a purpose.

Represent GoGo externally

• Attend scientific conferences, investigator meetings, and research workshops.
• Present GoGo's research platform to academic and industry audiences.
• Develop scientific communications and partnership materials.
• Help establish GoGo as a credible research partner within the aging and translational science communities.

What Success Looks Like

First 6 months

• Build a high-quality network of academic investigators and research organizations in priority scientific areas.
• Develop a structured pipeline of potential collaborations and funding opportunities.
• Establish relationships with a small number of highly credible scientific champions.
• Identify several specific, hypothesis-driven studies where GoGo's population provides a meaningful advantage.
• Help define the criteria we should use to decide which research opportunities GoGo should pursue.

First 12–18 months

• Establish multiple active academic research collaborations.
• Develop and/or support several competitive grant or sponsored-research proposals.
• Launch the first externally driven research studies using the GoGo cohort.
• Establish at least one repeatable partnership model with an academic research institution.
• Establish a pipeline of industry opportunities alongside academic collaborations.
• Help create a scientific roadmap for the cohort based on the questions researchers are actually trying to answer.

What We're Looking For

We are looking for someone who combines scientific credibility, curiosity, relationship-building ability, and execution.

Required qualifications

• PhD, MD, or equivalent advanced scientific training in immunology, biology, aging/geroscience, epidemiology, translational medicine, or a related field.
• 6+ years of experience in academic research, biotechnology, pharmaceutical research, translational medicine, scientific partnerships, or a related field.
• Demonstrated ability to understand and discuss primary scientific literature and research questions at a sophisticated level.
• Experience working with academic investigators and/or research institutions.
• Strong understanding of how academic research is funded and how collaborations between universities and companies are structured.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong project management and organizational skills.
• Ability to operate independently in an ambiguous, early-stage environment.

Strongly preferred

• Experience developing academic-industry research collaborations.
• Experience with NIH or foundation grant development.
• Experience in aging biology, immunology, biomarkers, oncology, or another area relevant to GoGo's research strategy.
• Existing relationships with researchers at major academic medical centers.
• Experience translating scientific ideas into research proposals or funded studies.
• Experience with human cohorts, longitudinal studies, clinical research, or biospecimen programs.
• Experience working at a biotech, pharmaceutical company, CRO, academic translational research center, or similar organization.
• Publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The Ideal Candidate

You might be a scientist who has spent years in academia and has become increasingly interested in translating research into real-world applications.

Or you might already work in scientific business development, external innovation, research partnerships, or translational research.

What matters most is that you are someone who:

• Gets genuinely excited by unanswered scientific questions.
• Can read a paper and quickly understand what remains unknown.
• Enjoys talking to scientists and earning their trust.
• Is comfortable saying, "I don't know, let's figure it out."
• Can move fluidly between a conversation with a world-class PI and a conversation with an operations team implementing a blood-draw protocol.
• Wants to build something new rather than manage an established partnership portfolio.

Compensation

Competitive salary and equity, commensurate with experience.

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Interview Process

Interview Process

1. 20-minute introductory conversation with the CEO
2. 60-minute scientific and partnership deep dive
3. Case study: Develop a one-page concept for a research collaboration that could be enabled by GoGo's cohort. The proposal should identify:
   • Scientific opportunity
   • Unmet need
   • Central question / hypothesis
   • Why GoGo's population provides a unique advantage
   • Potential research partner(s)
   • Proposed study concept
   • Potential funding path
   • Expected scientific impact
4. Panel interview with scientific and operational team members
5. Reference checks