Industrial Partnerships Program Director

Oak Ridge National Laboratory•Oak Ridge, TN

32d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking an experienced profession to lead ACCEL (Accelerating Competitiveness through Computational ExceLlence), an industrial partnerships program within the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS). This position can be on-site, remote, or hybrid. Selection will be based on qualifications, relevant experience, skills, and education. NCCS provides state-of-the-art computational and data science infrastructure coupled with dedicated technical and scientific professionals tackling large-scale S&T challenges across a broad range of scientific domains for accelerating scientific discovery and engineering advances. NCCS hosts the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, one of DOE’s National User Facilities which operates Frontier, the nation’s first exascale supercomputer. The Program Director of ACCEL will collaborate across other sections in the division and directorate to strategically advance the ACCEL industry partnership program so that it continues to be recognized as the premier industrial partnerships program for leadership computing within the DOE. Consistent with ORNL’s culture, historical leadership, and continued vision to be the world’s premier R&D institution for computational science, the Program Director will foster relationships with ambitious industry partners so that they can collaborate with ORNL’s flagship computational ecosystem. The candidate must be able to interact comfortably with both corporate and laboratory researchers, laboratory management, and industry C-suite executives who often are the decision makers that permit their research teams to use national laboratory computing systems to solve competitively important corporate science and engineering problems. ACCEL’s Program Director also serves as an ambassador for the lab and the leadership computing facility to industry and may be the first person to ever inform a company that they may qualify for access to OLCF resources.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree with minimum 10 years relevant experiences.
Experience in partnership development and relationship management in/across the public and/or private sectors.
Commitment to advancing scientific missions and national competitiveness.

Nice To Haves

Basic understanding of the DOE national laboratory system and preferably its variety of user facilities, including its high-performance computing user facilities.
Working knowledge of why and how companies across a spectrum of industries use high performance computing.
Comfortable operating in a matrixed environment.
Excellent organizational and interpersonal skills.
Enthusiastic first-approach skills.
While you don’t need to be a computer or computational scientist, you must be comfortable acting as a bridge between potential and current industrial users of OLCF leadership computing resources and the diverse experts within OLCF that can speak with users specifically about their science/engineering challenges.

Responsibilities

Grow the industrial partnerships program by identifying and cultivating new industrial users for the OLCF resources.
Understand the different allocation programs to apply for time on the OLCF systems and their requirements and be able to discuss these clearly with potential new industrial users so they can determine if they might qualify to receive an allocation.
Understand the legal agreements required to use the OLCF resources and be able to explain these generally in advance to potential new users. (Note that if an award is made, OLCF has an experienced on-boarding team that will lead a new user through each step.)
Nurture current OLCF industrial users to ensure they continue to bring their large-scale computational problems to OLCF.
As relationships with industry users grow, identify potential areas for scientific collaboration between industry and the researchers within OLCF and the broader computing directorate, and bring relevant parties together to explore and decide on specific collaborative projects.
Understand the OLCF science impact business model and be able to explain it to potential users so they understand the context and rationale for the different allocation programs and legal agreements.
Be prepared to work with OLCF leadership to develop new programs and opportunities to expand industrial usage as laboratory and DOE needs and requirements change.
Organize visits to OLCF/CCSD for company researchers/executives to meet with lab researchers/executives to better familiarize the company with OLCF/CCSD and the lab and identify new areas to work together.
Work with OLCF communications team to develop stories for the OLCF and DOE websites about industrial accomplishments using OLCF resources.
Provide management support to the Division Director for an industry and federal agency computing roundtable that reports to him and his counterpart at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.