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:
The author frames research management as “servant leadership” plus “radical candor,” focused on helping scholars set goals, unblock progress, and receive timely critical feedback without replacing mentor supervision.
Deep technical expertise is often less important than curiosity, prioritisation support, and challenging scholars’ theories of change early to avoid unproductive research paths.
The RM role spans project management, life coaching, pseudo-mentorship, research output review, career coaching, networking, and logistical navigation, with intensity varying by scholar.
An internal “RPG skill tree” is used to reflect how different RMs allocate strengths across people management, project management, life coaching, and research supervision.
As a senior RM, the author spent under half their time on direct scholar support, with the remainder split across managing other RMs, internal projects, infrastructure, events, and strategy work.
Although internal projects felt less directly rewarding than scholar work, the author judged some to be higher impact given comparative advantage, and remains committed to research management in AI alignment after leaving MATS.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
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:
The author frames research management as “servant leadership” plus “radical candor,” focused on helping scholars set goals, unblock progress, and receive timely critical feedback without replacing mentor supervision.
Deep technical expertise is often less important than curiosity, prioritisation support, and challenging scholars’ theories of change early to avoid unproductive research paths.
The RM role spans project management, life coaching, pseudo-mentorship, research output review, career coaching, networking, and logistical navigation, with intensity varying by scholar.
An internal “RPG skill tree” is used to reflect how different RMs allocate strengths across people management, project management, life coaching, and research supervision.
As a senior RM, the author spent under half their time on direct scholar support, with the remainder split across managing other RMs, internal projects, infrastructure, events, and strategy work.
Although internal projects felt less directly rewarding than scholar work, the author judged some to be higher impact given comparative advantage, and remains committed to research management in AI alignment after leaving MATS.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.