Project Manager, Academic Engagements

What You’ll Do:

• Translate Ethereum research priorities into questions, framings, and research opportunities that resonate with scholars in adjacent fields.
• Identify academic communities and researchers whose existing work intersects with problems relevant to Ethereum, and build pathways for them to engage with the ecosystem.
• Build and manage strategic partnerships with universities, research labs, and academic consortia globally.
• Design and scale academic programs (workshops, curriculum collaborations, hackathons, lecture series).
• Work with EF teams and ecosystem researchers to understand where academic expertise could help advance important open questions, and connect those needs with the right scholars and institutions.
• Drive distribution of research through events, publications, and multi-format content to reach the right audiences.
• Develop and support funding pathways for academic research in partnership with Funding Coordination and ecosystem stakeholders.
• Track program impact and provide clear reporting on outcomes and ecosystem value.

What You’ll Bring

Professional Experience

• 3+ years of experience managing academic programs, research partnerships, or university-industry collaborations.
• Demonstrated success coordinating multi-stakeholder projects and programs with measurable outcomes.
• Experience working with diverse, distributed teams across time zones.
• Having a PhD, and experience doing academic research is highly desirable.

Academic & Ecosystem Knowledge

• Ability to understand research problems across disciplines and communicate them in ways that make sense to different academic audiences.
• Ability to spot connections between Ethereum-specific questions and broader scholarly debates.
• Strong understanding of academic research practices, incentive structures, publication cycles, and university admin dynamics.
• Familiarity with blockchain research, Ethereum fundamentals, or related technologies is highly desirable.

Skills & Attributes

• Exceptional cross-cultural communication and relationship-building capabilities.
• Strong project planning and execution skills, with comfort managing ambiguity and evolving priorities.
• Proficiency with modern collaboration and project management tools (Notion, Google Suites of Tools - Docs, Slides).

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior experience in grants coordination or academic funding mechanisms.
• Background in research organization or scholarly publishing.
• Experience organizing academic conferences, workshops, and seminars.