OpenAI is recruiting an Academic Research Partnerships & Programs Lead to expand adoption of its AI products across funded laboratories and R1 universities in the United States. Based in San Francisco or New York City, the role combines business development with program management, covering relationships with principal investigators, researchers, research software engineers, computing teams and university technology leaders. The successful candidate will identify priority labs, run pilot and fellows programs, address technical and institutional barriers, and develop routes from researchers to laboratories and universities. OpenAI expects the lead to translate research workflows into sustained use of Pro, Codex, the API and ChatGPT Edu. The role carries adoption and expansion targets, including fellow selection, activation, retained usage, conversion and progression from individual researchers to institution-level deployment. Jayna Devani, Education Lead at OpenAI, described the recruitment as an attempt to narrow the distance between developments in frontier AI and their use by scientists. Devani pointed to existing academic relationships with “top labs” at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the Max Planck Society, A*STAR Research, the University of Oxford and Stanford University. The new lead will also “engage in the hard questions around how AI is changing scientific research outputs & productivity e.g. IP, the nature of research, trust, funding.” Candidates are expected to have experience in business development, program management, partnerships or technical go-to-market work involving higher education, research, developer or technical communities, as well as knowledge of funded labs and hard-science research.