About CSP:
The Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP) is a unit at the Department of Banking and Finance at the University of Zurich (UZH) dedicated to enabling sustainable development. We work to advance sustainable finance through research and training programs, with a globally unique focus on high- and ultra-high-net-worth private investors and family offices. We operate globally, with a focus on the Americas, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Founded in 2017, we are a spin-off of a related research and training program at the Initiative for Responsible Investment (IRI) at Harvard Kennedy School and based on the former Center for Microfinance at UZH. We have strong ties to the leading researchers, practitioners, and membership organizations in our space and close collaborations with key international actors (such as the World Economic Forum, IRI at Harvard Kennedy School, MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, The ImPact, Toniic, Nexus, Katapult, BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt). Our team of impact-driven professionals continues to grow, especially as we advance projects in Asia and North America.
Your Role:
As a Research Coordination Manager, your work will be at the heart of CSP’s mission to bridge science and practice –using your research abilities, knack for science communication, and relationship-management skills to connect the two.
You will play a central role in CSP’s rapidly expanding science communication activities and collaborate closely with a variety of stakeholders to make sure valuable research insights inform practitioners’ investment decisions. As such, your work can inform action to move capital, advance research, influence policies, and bring people together to maximize the impact of their work across the globe.
By keeping your finger on the pulse of sustainable finance research globally and sharing your insights and key messages in compelling ways, you will make scientific findings accessible to wealth owners, private banks, family offices, practitioners, financial institutions, and regulators who can implement them. Likewise, by staying involved with such key actors, you’ll collect information about the most pressing knowledge gaps, which, in turn, you will bring back into the academic community to inform the direction of future research.
This position is an opportunity to grow as a professional, join a mission-driven, pragmatic and fast-paced team working towards sustainability in a very interesting field, and make a meaningful contribution to moving sustainable finance forward. If this sounds like your dream role, we’d love to hear from you!
Tasks
Knowledge Building and Sharing:
- Develop strategies for tracking global scientific research projects, findings and results.
- Keep abreast of the latest developments in the field of academic sustainable finance research and market developments and play a central role in synthesizing those insights and integrating them into CSP reports guides, white papers, summaries, and other media.
- Collaborate closely with the communications team and contribute to communication campaigns and dissemination plans for flagship projects and thematic areas related to research.
- Be a go-to person for the latest insights into the field within the CSP team, as well as our partners in academia and practice.
- Support the trainings team in integrating the latest research findings into training materials for wealth owners, wealth managers, and other professionals.
- Help advance the field of sustainable finance by identifying promising research teams, important papers and key opportunities, and informing research funding decisions together with a related foundation and partners.
Network Coordination:
- Maintain close relationships with our global research community and further grow our base of impactful, world-class research collaborators, while establishing processes for working with existing research networks and building new ones.
- Stay in conversation with our partners in practice (investors, financial institutions, NGOs, regulators) to match their research needs with either existing science or new projects.
Requirements
Core Skills:
- Science background: Deep knowledge of sustainability topics, sustainable finance, impact investing, private wealth, and the banking sector. Proven mastery in understanding scientific papers in sustainable finance and extracting key messages.
- Science communication skills: Outstanding ability to summarize and communicate complex ideas with clarity, ‘translating’ research findings into written, visual, and multimedia formats that engage their target audiences.
- User-centricity: Know how to speak and relate with our key audiences, and what kind of information these audiences need and how to get this to them most effectively.
- Strong interpersonal skills: Have a broad and diverse personal network and solid project management skills, which are essential for the network coordination and interdisciplinary collaboration aspects of this role.
Additional Requirements:
- Master’s degree or PhD in a field related to sustainable finance, or proven expertise in working with related academic research at equivalent levels of rigor.
- A strong track record as a part of a dynamic and global team. Past experience leading an international team of researchers in application- and project-oriented research is a plus.
- A minimum of three to five years of progressively responsible work experience is required.
- High levels of self-motivation, leadership, and organization.
- A voracious love of learning and a penchant for effective networking.
- Outstanding English communication skills (written and oral) are essential. Good communication skills in German are a plus.
- An eye for design, a flair for engaging communications, and high standards of work quality.
- Trustworthiness in handling confidential data.
- Confident command of a variety of software and digital collaboration tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud, MS Office, Slack, Asana, Odoo, Zoom.
- Permission to work in Switzerland.
Benefits
- Be part of a very results-oriented, entrepreneurial, pragmatic, science-based, and fast-moving team that is highly qualified and deeply driven for the advancement of sustainable development.
- Be embedded in a global community of impact-minded academics (e.g. Harvard University, MIT), practitioners (e.g. UBS, Credit Suisse), investors (e.g. UHNWIs and their families).
- Be part of an important movement and have a tangible impact for sustainable development on a global scale.
- Gain knowledge, experience, and a network in sustainable finance.
Please note: We operate with Cantonal salary scales. Our salaries are thus lower than those in the private sector. The salary is determined according to work experience and function together with the HR team of UZH.
We looking forward to hearing from you!
Please include the following to your application:
- Cover letter
- CV
- Portfolio or links to recent work samples