Thank you for writing this! I had been missing a resource I could point people towards who were interested in Research Manager roles, and this post fills that gap perfectly.
If someone would read this and think to themselves "I might be a good RM", what’s the most important thing you’d want them to check about themselves to see if they're a good fit for the role?
Thanks!
I think I've leaned into the people management aspects of the role here and away from the object-level research skills. So I guess the thing I'd flag as important is having a broad understanding of the research landscape (and an interest in keeping up with it). Although the deep technical knowledge isn't essential, it's important to be able to understand the position of projects within the research landscape.
Executive summary: Drawing on personal experience as a London-based Research Manager at MATS in 2025, the author reflects on research management as a generalist, service-oriented role combining scholar support, mentoring enablement, people management, and internal projects, concluding that it is highly rewarding and impactful despite trade-offs that ultimately motivated a transition to AISI.
Key points:
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Throughout this post I’m speaking in my personal capacity, not as a MATS representative. In particular, I’m drawing from my experience of RM in London in 2025, mostly covering the extension phase of the MATS program. Aspects of this may not be representative of broader research management at MATS or the main program in Berkeley. Please see this related post for some other MATS RMs' perspectives
I’ve been a Research Manager at MATS since the start of 2025. Most weeks, people receiving 80k career advising asked me about what my work actually involves, so I thought I’d write a post with my thoughts on the role.
This post was originally intended to be posted alongside @frances_lorenz’ post on my career transition during Career Conversations Week and inspired by other great posts. However, through my delay in posting it now takes on a different context, a fond reflection of my time at MATS as it draws to an end.
I studied Aerospace Engineering at Bristol and after not securing a role in the UK’s modest space sector, I went to London to work in tech roles in financial services. For ten years I was a technical product manager, building benchmarking and analytics platforms in capital markets.
Frances recently wrote a great piece about my career transition, which you can read here.
Scholars at MATS work with brilliant mentors who provide research supervision for their projects. They are also paired with a research manager who provides additional support. My approach to research management is centred around a strong commitment to servant leadership and radical candor.
I am here to help the scholars (and their mentors) get the most out of MATS by finding ways in which we can support them, helping them set and achieve their goals, unblock them and advocate for their needs within MATS. While RMs can occasionally provide research supervision, this guidance primarily comes from mentors. Although during the extension there can be more scope for this kind of contribution.
I’m also trying to challenge their plans, their theory of change and their conclusions. This comes less naturally to me, requiring a conscious effort to push back, as I remind myself that being overly deferential ultimately fails the scholar. For instance, providing excessive support and insufficient critical feedback early in a project can steer a scholar toward an unfruitful path, such as running uninformative experiments.
Most of this is downstream of a genuine curiosity about the scholars and their research, as this can motivate questions that are also useful for the scholar. However, in my experience, a deep technical understanding of their work isn't always necessary. You’d be surprised how much you can contribute in some cases when just discussing “The Project With Alice” in the abstract, by prompting the scholar to think about prioritisation, collaboration or their own uncertainties.
There’s a range of services I aspire to offer scholars as an RM, I’ve tried to list the main ones below. Of course, every scholar has different needs and I don’t claim to provide all of these services. In some cases, I’ve found the RM:Scholar relationship can be fairly minimal weekly progress check ins.
Similarly, RM’s strengths vary. One framing we’ve used internally to reflect on individuals’ strengths is the idea of an RPG-style skill tree for RMs, and how we’d see our 15 skillpoints spent across the major axes of the role.
For the curious here’s my self-assessment:
It’s a fairly generalist role and others have given very different allocations. I encourage people to look at the profiles of MATS RMs for a sense of how varied it can be.
I think part of the metaskill of being an RM is having self knowledge of these strengths and being able to quickly identify the jagged frontiers of scholar needs to find overlaps.
Currently, I spend less than half my time on direct research management. I’ve always taken on quite a lot of operational / internal project responsibility in London but recently as a senior RM I also now have other RMs to manage, so I now manage half the scholars I used to.
As a result my week is a bit atypical, but I’ll try and outline the major themes of the role below. This is shaped by my experience, but somewhat generalised.
I consider the RM's core responsibility to be to their scholars.
Here's a list of things RMs can do for mentors:
Often the value I am to provide for mentors is to enable their relationship with scholars to focus more on the research, whilst we take care of the other stuff.
As a senior RM I also manage other RMs, so part of my role is supporting them.
I also contribute to other projects and improvements; there’s a strong ownership culture around projects at MATS.
These are some of my projects, but project work varies a lot from RM to RM, based on their strengths.
I’ve loved working as an RM, I find it deeply rewarding and I think it is a highly impactful role. Working with MATS scholars was such a privilege, they are just some of the most brilliant and conscientious people earnestly working to solve some of the world’s biggest, wicked problems. I find it extremely rewarding to support them in whatever ways that I can.
While it remains varied and interesting, I find the internal project work is often less directly rewarding than working with scholars. I felt somewhat conflicted about shifting my focus away from that, but I do think that some of the other (internal project) work I did at MATS is potentially more impactful and that I might have some comparative advantage there, so it seemed important to work on.
Deciding to leave MATS was one of the toughest choices I’ve had to make. However I remain committed to research management within the Alignment space and am excited to continue it at AISI.
Thanks for the post, Cameron! I strongly upvoted it. I think it is very valuable to have posts unpacking jobs.