Senior Research Manager for Sponsored Research

For over 35 years, Youth Villages has transformed the lives of children and families nationwide through innovative, research-based programs focused on preserving and restoring families.

As a national leader in children’s mental and behavioral health, we serve more than 47,000 youth, young people, and their families annually across 29 states and Washington, D.C. Our proven treatment models drive long-term success in child welfare, juvenile justice, and mental health systems. At Youth Villages, we do what works — partnering with others to expand our impact and advocate for meaningful, lasting change.

We're seeking purpose-driven individuals who are passionate about making a difference. With a dedicated team of more than 5,000 staff, Youth Villages is committed to investing in and supporting our employees by offering opportunities to build a fulfilling career through professional growth, personal development, and a mission that matters— helping children and families live successfully.

For more information, please visit www.youthvillages.org


 Program Overview:

Youth Villages is seeking a strategic, highly organized Senior Research Manager for Sponsored Research to lead complex research and evidence-building initiatives that support program improvement, service expansion, and child welfare system change. Reporting to the Director of Research, the person in this role will provide scientific and project leadership across multi-partner research initiatives, working with Youth Villages teams, external research partners, and state and local child welfare agencies. This role will help ensure that research and administrative data are used to answer meaningful strategic questions, inform decisions, and strengthen the use of evidence across Youth Villages and its public-sector partnerships. The Senior Research Manager for Sponsored Research will have primary responsibility for coordinating Map2Impact, a multi-state partnership with the Center for State Child Welfare Data at Chapin Hall, while also supporting connections between this work and Youth Villages’ broader research, evaluation, implementation, and scaling priorities.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

I. Provide Strategic and Scientific Leadership

• •Develop and manage learning agendas for sponsored research projects; identify priority questions, analyses, evidence needs, and major milestones in collaboration with internal and external partners.
• •Ensure initiatives in their portfolio are designed to inform specific strategic, programmatic, policy, or practice decisions.
• •Provide scientific guidance on research questions, analytic approaches, interpretation, and appropriate use of findings.
• •Critically evaluate analytic methods, assumptions, findings, and limitations and facilitate resolution of methodological questions with research partners.
• •Review reports, dashboards, visualizations, and other products to strengthen their clarity, usability, and relevance for decision-makers.
• •Identify emerging evidence needs and opportunities to refine, expand, or standardize analytic approaches.
• •Provide research partners with relevant context about Youth Villages services, implementation, organizational priorities, and the policy and practice environments in which programs operate.

II. Support Evidence Use and Public-System Partnerships

• •Work with Youth Villages teams and state and local partners to identify strategic questions that research and administrative data can help address.
• •Facilitate interpretation of findings, incorporating relevant policy, practice, service, implementation, and jurisdictional context.
• •Maintain a clear understanding of partner priorities, available evidence, key findings, decisions informed by the evidence, open questions, and next steps.
• •Support data-sharing processes and help address organizational or relationship barriers that affect research partnerships.
• •Support onboarding and engagement of new jurisdiction partners and opportunities to expand evidence-building initiatives.
• •Facilitate cross-jurisdiction learning, including communities of practice and other opportunities to share findings, approaches, and lessons learned.
• •Coordinate dissemination of findings through presentations, reports, publications, conferences, and other forums in collaboration with Communications and other teams as appropriate.

III. Lead Complex Sponsored Research Partnerships and Projects

• •Coordinate work across Youth Villages teams, external researchers, public-system partners, and other collaborators.
• •Manage project plans, timelines, deliverables, dependencies, decisions, and communications across multiple workstreams and jurisdictions.
• •Maintain shared project-management systems that provide visibility into priorities, responsibilities, decisions, deliverables, barriers, and next steps.
• •Ensure partners receive timely feedback, decisions, contextual information, and access to appropriate Youth Villages staff and external stakeholders.
• •Maintain continuity of decisions and commitments across teams, meetings, and workstreams.
• •Proactively identify competing priorities, barriers, and delays and assess implications for commitments, staffing, budgets, and timelines.
• •Lead regular partnership check-ins and contribute to assessment of partnership effectiveness and progress toward shared goals.

IV. Strengthen Organizational Capacity to Use Evidence

• •Develop learning opportunities, facilitation, coaching, tools, and resources that strengthen the ability of Youth Villages staff and partners to use evidence systematically in decision-making.
• •Help teams distinguish observations from hypotheses, identify potential drivers of outcomes, select strategies responsive to those drivers, and define measurable expected results.
• •Support use of the EDGE (Evidence-Driven Growth & Excellence) framework and other structured approaches to evidence-informed decision-making where appropriate.
• •Help teams interpret evidence, formulate testable explanations, select appropriate responses, and assess whether strategies are producing expected results.
• •Integrate evidence-use practices into communities of practice and other opportunities for shared learning and continuous improvement.

V. Connect Evidence Across Organizational Priorities

• •Build connections across research, evaluation, implementation, scaling, and system-change initiatives so that relevant evidence is shared and used across portfolios.
• •Work closely with colleagues responsible for Intercept and other program scaling and evaluation efforts to identify where administrative data and other research findings can inform expansion, implementation, practice, and policy.
• •Coordinate research questions, timelines, evidence products, interpretation, and dissemination when initiatives intersect.
• •Identify opportunities to synthesize findings across projects to inform broader organizational strategy and learning.

Qualifications:

• •Doctorate in psychology, public policy, public administration, social work, epidemiology, or a related social or behavioral science field is required, with 5+ years of related experience.
• •Strong expertise in quantitative research methods, study design, statistical analysis, and interpretation of complex observational data required.
• •Demonstrated ability to critically evaluate research questions, analytic approaches, and the strength and limitations of evidence required.
• •Experience working with large administrative or longitudinal datasets preferred.
• •Understanding of implementation science, applied research methods, program evaluation, and/or continuous improvement required.
• •Demonstrated success leading complex, multi-partner initiatives involving multiple stakeholders and competing priorities required.
• •Excellent project management and organizational skills, with the ability to manage multiple workstreams simultaneously required.
• •Ability to build productive relationships with researc