Gretchen Kiser, PhD
Dr. Gretchen Kiser is the Executive Director of the Research Development Office (RDO) at the University of California San Francisco. In this role, she supports institutional research goals and strategic research initiatives broadly, leading a professional team: that employs innovative team science methods toward fostering development of collaborative, multi-disciplinary research teams and facilitating development of large, complex multi-investigator research proposals, and that manages the strategic distribution of intramural research funds and the selection of campus limited submission funding opportunity nominees.
Dr. Kiser has a diverse research background in cell biology, genetics, genomics, and molecular biology, including several years in the biotech industry focused on genotyping and gene expression product development. While in industry, she also acquired expertise in Lean Six Sigma, a statistical measurement-based business management strategy. She combines her hands-on research experience with research and faculty development, team science, teaching, and technical writing experience.
As a past president, an elected Fellow and a recipient of the 2021 Leadership Award from the National Organization of Research Development Professionals (NORDP), she is recognized by as a leader in research development, an emerging field that sits at the nexus of research administration and research and encompasses the strategic development of new knowledge and knowledge mobilization. Team science is an essential element of research development and Dr. Kiser has developed and implemented a diverse set of methods and formats for team science, team-building, and conflict resolution all toward fostering innovative approaches and novel partnerships, facilitating greater team /program productivity, as well as increasing institutional competitiveness and capabilities in research funding. She has broad experience working in partnership with individual faculty members, teams of researchers, external cross-sector stakeholders and various institutional administrators and leaders to nurture the research programs and the institutional research enterprise generally.
Dr. Kiser received her B.Sc. in Biology at UCLA, where her passion for academic research was sparked, and her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology (Genetics minor), studying cell cycle regulation in the yeast genetics lab of Dr. Ted Weinert at the University of Arizona. She then went on to a post-doctoral fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in the protein structure/function lab of Dr. John Riordan.