Overview

The Director, Global Applications & Scientific Operations leads MSD's worldwide applications strategy and operating model. This leader builds one connected scientific community across Global Applications, R&D Applications, and Regional Field Applications, aligning talent and priorities to deliver annual commercial commitments while strengthening long-term innovation, capability, and customer impact.

The Director partners with Commercial, R&D, Product Management, Marketing, Service, and Quality to translate customer workflows and market needs into applications priorities, new-product requirements, launch readiness, reusable scientific content, and capability investments. The role balances immediate business needs with a rolling three-year plan for talent, technology, scientific novelty, and operational improvement.

Responsibilities

• Commercial momentum: Align the global applications talent pool, technical expertise, and capacity to priority markets, strategic opportunities, customer escalations, and AOP commitments. Establish transparent prioritization and impact measures.
• Global operating model: Define strategy, roles, decision rights, governance, planning cadences, support tiers, and handoffs across Global, R&D, and Regional Field Applications while preserving regional commercial accountability.
• Field Applications partnership: Work with regional leaders through a dotted-line relationship to align technical standards, talent development, resource deployment, field training, escalation support, and reusable content priorities.
• Scientific and sales enablement: Ensure delivery of field training and sales-training content. Set priorities for market-relevant collateral supporting in-market products, including webinars, seminars, technical tips, web series, application notes, and workflow guidance.
• Talent and culture: Lead, coach, and develop global scientific talent. Establish competency models, succession plans, career pathways, mentoring, onboarding, and skill-based development programs that support mobility and retention.
• Knowledge management: Sponsor the worldwide framework for creating, reviewing, approving, finding, reusing, maintaining, and retiring applications knowledge and training assets. Promote collaboration and reduce duplicated effort across regions.
• Long-term growth and NPI: Own a rolling three-year applications plan for scientific novelty and NPI execution. Ensure programs include customer workflows, validated methods, reference data, training, content, and regional readiness before launch.
• Voice of Customer and product development: Represent the scientific customer in research and NPD. Own workflow definition and applications input to product specifications, data validation, applications feasibility studies, field testing, ideation, and design reviews.
• External scientific leadership: Increase the team’s presence through conferences, publications, webinars, standards activities, collaborations, and KOL relationships. Align targeted KOL campaigns with strategic markets and portfolio priorities.
• Operational excellence: Use demand, capacity, quality, adoption, training, content, and customer-impact metrics to identify gaps, improve processes, manage short- and long-term resource needs, and communicate risks and trade-offs to leadership.

 

Qualifications

 

• Advanced degree in materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, physics, polymer science, or a related scientific discipline; PhD preferred.
• Significant leadership experience in applications, R&D, product development, scientific operations, or a technical commercial organization, including leadership of global or highly matrixed teams.
• Demonstrated success translating customer workflows, market needs, and commercial priorities into portfolio, product, capability, content, and resource decisions.
• Strong people-development, succession-planning, change-leadership, and organizational-design capabilities, with the ability to influence across solid-line and dotted-line relationships.
• Executive-level communication and stakeholder-management skills, with scientific credibility among customers, scientists, commercial leaders, and external experts.
• Experience in thermal analysis, rheology, or adjacent materials-characterization technologies and markets preferred.