Senior Vice President, Genomics Research — Programme Bridge

The mandate

Sequencing, infectious-disease and surveillance programmes require a senior research leader who can arbitrate scientific priorities and resource commitments consistently across competent investigators. The role matters because incomplete evidence can still consume grant milestones, scarce laboratory capacity and partner confidence. The interim SVP must restore research decision accountability without substituting managerial urgency for scientific validity.

The proposed start is 19 October 2026 for twelve months. A successor search will run in parallel, seeking a permanent research leader rather than a general commercial executive. Mumbai is the base, with planned India laboratory and collaborator visits. International scientific discussions are remote unless approved project needs justify travel; the appointment does not imply unrestricted access to overseas human-sample datasets.

Handover requires a portfolio with explicit hypotheses, reproducible analysis status, grant obligations and documented continue, modify or stop decisions. Each active programme must have an accountable investigator, an approved ethics and data-use route, and a funded milestone plan. The successor must chair a scientific portfolio review and receive the unresolved methodological and collaborator issues, including negative findings that would otherwise disappear from progress reporting.

The SVP may reallocate research effort within approved grants and schedules, commission methodological review and pause internally discretionary work where evidence or compliance is inadequate. New clinical studies, changes to consent conditions, grant-budget transfers outside permitted limits and permanent principal-investigator appointments need governing-body approval. Ethics committees and qualified clinical leads retain their independent decisions; research leadership cannot waive participant protection to recover a delayed calendar.

Commercial diagnostic claims, routine clinical care and general IT leadership are outside the assignment. Scientific accountability includes genomics quality, infectious-disease relevance and credible translational stage gates, not a promise to turn every discovery into a product. The bridge should leave a more discriminating programme portfolio and a usable evidence trail rather than a larger collection of optimistic progress presentations.

What you will own

• Decide research continuation gates using hypothesis quality, reproducibility, grant constraints and translational relevance, recording the reasons for stopping weak work rather than simply delaying it.
• Approve a programme dependency map linking sequencing quality, analysis readiness, collaborator inputs and funded scientific milestones, exposing dependencies requiring a resource decision or programme amendment.
• Commission independent review of ambiguous infectious-disease findings before authorising expanded experiments or public scientific claims, preserving the methodological disagreement and required validation.
• Set an evidence register preserving methods, quality exclusions, negative results and unresolved analytical limitations, distinguishing missing data from evidence against the original hypothesis.
• Resolve laboratory and research-capacity priorities within authorised funding, escalating ethics or grant amendments to their proper bodies with the scientific consequence and revised delivery plan.
• Induct the permanent research leader through a witnessed portfolio review and transfer of scientific, funding and collaboration risks, including unresolved findings requiring future decisions.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring twenty-two or more years in genomics, infectious-disease research or a closely related scientific leadership career, with demonstrated senior research-team accountability. Describe a programme you stopped or redirected based on evidence, including the scientific disagreement, the resource decision you owned and what later findings revealed about that judgement.
• Demonstrate practical knowledge of whole-genome sequencing quality, analytical reproducibility and interpretation boundaries. Explain an instance where contamination, sampling design or analytical assumptions changed a biological conclusion. The role requires scientific judgement across teams, not personal expertise in every assay; disclose where you relied on independent methodological specialists.
• Show leadership of funded research involving infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance or population surveillance. Provide evidence of grant milestone management, collaborator accountability and ethics or data-use governance, including a case where scientific integrity required revising a promised output rather than disguising negative or incomplete results.
• Prove you have transferred scientific programmes to another investigator or leader without losing methods, limitations and unpublished evidence. Describe your approach to supervision, authorship disputes and the distinction between research findings and clinical claims. Provide a transferred analysis that the receiving investigator reproduced, including a methodological limitation that continued to constrain interpretation and dissemination.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 13 October 2026. Mandate reference PCT-INT-2026-IND-43.